The Nuremberg Code Protects against coerced, or mandated MASKS / VACCINATION
Both in direct violation of these principals.
Nuremberg Trials are now regarded as a milestone toward the establishment of a permanent international court, and an important precedent for dealing with later instances of genocide and other crimes against humanity.
Nuremburg Trials Ultimately Lead to Geneva Convention Protocols Protecting Human Dignity and Medical Freedom
After the Nürnberg and Tokyo trials, numerous international treaties and conventions attempted to devise acomprehensiveand enforceable definition of war crimes. The four separateGeneva conventions, adopted in 1949, in theory made prosecutable certain acts committed in violation of the laws of war. The conventions provided for the protection of wounded, sick, and shipwrecked military personnel,prisoners of war, and civilians. Like the convention on genocide, however, the Geneva conventions specified that trials were to be arranged by individual governments. In 1977 twoprotocolswere adopted to clarify and supplement the Geneva conventions. Recognizing that many conflicts were internal rather than international in scope, the secondprotocolafforded greater protection toguerillacombatants in civil wars or wars of “self-determination.”
A VIOLATION OF ARTICLE 6 OF THE UNESCO 2005 STATEMENT ON BIOETHICS AND HUMAN RIGHTS
Article 6, section 1: Any preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic medical intervention is only to be carried out with the prior, free and informed consent of the person concerned, based on adequate information. The consent should, where appropriate, be express and may be withdrawn by the person concerned at any time and for any reason WITHOUT DISADVANTAGE or prejudice. (caps mine)
Article 6, section 3:In no case should a collective community agreement or the consent of a community leader or other authority substitute for an individual’s informed consent.
Vaccines are in direct violation of the Nuremberg Code and as more vaccines and doses have been added to the CDC schedule, that violation has clearly been increased.That violation is directly due to the lack of informed consent, and as to the know serious level of risk and harm that have been done, and continue to be done by vaccines. Risk of vaccine injury, and as well resulting death. All of which are seriously denied and downplayed by sources such as the CDC, Pediatrics, and the FDA, etc.
“After releasing VAXXED: FROM COVER-UP TO CATASTROPHE in the spring of 2016, we toured America and other parts of the world recording parents’ tragic accounts of their children’s vaccine injury and death. After amassing an amazing library of stories, we realized that we needed a platform to host these brave people’s tales. This is how Peeps TV was born.”
Although brave to come forward, let us not forget that Dr. William Thompson, Dr. Colleen Boyle, Dr. Frank DeStefano and others are now legitimate, international criminals awaiting hearing. It matters not what they say from here on out, humanity has enough evidence for proceedings to go forward with a Medical Nuremberg 2.0. The fact that Dr. William Thompson, Dr. Colleen Boyle, and Dr. Frank DeStefano are not in custody is another sad, historically documented example of the failure of our justice system to show teeth towards the crimes of the medical industry. Dr. William Thompson and perhaps the entire CDC have admitted to clear violations of the Nuremberg Principles laid out in 1948. To compound the urgency of this matter to be acted upon, many other international treatise and United Nations doctrines have been breached making this vaccine fraud prosecutable by any nation/country that wishes to side step the apathy of the United States for the good of the world. Sadly, by the lack of any action from medical oversight committees in the United States, we have sent a clear message to the world that we are the bad guys that either refuse to clean up our own back yard or willfully are criminals like the Nazi’s that sat on the stands in Nuremberg 66 years ago.
Here is a short list of international violations to be further investigated in relation to the willful vaccine induced damages during the research conducted in 2004 by Dr. William Thompson:
Nuremburg Principles:
Principle I states, “Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefore and liable to punishment.”
Principle III states, “The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as Head of State or responsible government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.”
Principle IV states: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him”.
Principle VII states, “Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity as set forth in Principle VI is a crime under international law.”
Nuremburg Code:
5.) No experiment should be conducted where there is a prior reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects.
6.) The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment.
7.) Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or death.
10.) During the course of the experiment the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill and careful judgment required of him that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.
Decleration of Geneva:
The health of my patient will be my first consideration
I will practice my profession with conscience and dignity
I will not use my medical knowledge to violate human rights and civil liberties, even under threat
I will maintain the utmost respect for human life
I will not permit considerations of age, disease or disability, creed, ethnic origin, gender, nationality, political affiliation, race, sexual orientation, social standing or any other factor to intervene between my duty and my patient
Declaration of Halsinki:-Operational Principles
Article 13: subject to independent ethical review and oversight by a properly convened committee
Article 17: Studies should be discontinued if the available information indicates that the original considerations are no longer satisfied
Article 16: Information regarding the study should be publicly available
Article 27: Ethical publications extend to publication of the results and consideration of any potential conflict of interest
Article 30: The interests of the subject after the study is completed should be part of the overall ethical assessment, including assuring their access to the best proven care
International Treatise under the United Nations United Nations Universal Doctrine of Human Rights Convention on the Rights of the Child
Article 19: of the Convention states that state parties must “take all appropriate legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to protect the child from all forms of physical or mental violence”
The system of Medical Ethics is purposely omitted due to its definition as a system of moral principles that apply values and judgements to the practice of medicine. This does not apply to the case of the CDC and others responsible because they have clearly shown by their actions that they have not morals and principles.
Dr. Brownstein: Why Are U.S. Children Dying At An Alarming Rate?
A new study published in the January, 2018 edition of the journal Health Affairs compared the mortality rate of children in 19 wealthy, Western countries. Guess who finished last? If you guessed the country that spends the most money on health care then you guessed correctly. The United States spends more money on health care than any other country on the face of the earth. In fact, we spend nearly 20% of our gross national product on health care—far greater when compared to any other Western country. The authors of the article comment, “The United States has poorer child health outcomes than other wealthy nations despite greater per capita spending on health care for children. While child mortality progressively declined across all countries, mortality in the US has been higher than in peer nations since the 1980s. From 2001 to 2010 the risk of death in the US {when compared to other Western countries} was 76 percent greater for infants and 57 percent greater for children ages 1–19.” Folks, if you want to measure the health of a country, one of the best indicators is the childhood mortality rate. Generally, the healthier the population is, the lower the childhood mortality rate. When you compare the U.S. childhood mortality rate to other Western countries, it is plain to see that our children are not doing well.
Child Mortality In The US And 19 OECD Comparator Nations: A 50-Year Time-Trend Analysis
ABSTRACTThe United States has poorer child health outcomes than other wealthy nations despite greater per capita spending on health care for children. To better understand this phenomenon, we examined mortality trends for the US and nineteen comparator nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development for children ages 0–19 from 1961 to 2010 using publicly available data. While child mortality progressively declined across all countries, mortality in the US has been higher than in peer nations since the 1980s. From 2001 to 2010 the risk of death in the US was 76 percent greater for infants and 57 percent greater for children ages 1–19. During this decade, children ages 15–19 were eighty-two times more likely to die from gun homicide in the US. Over the fifty-year study period, the lagging US performance amounted to over 600,000 excess deaths. Policy interventions should focus on infants and on children ages 15–19, the two age groups with the greatest disparities, by addressing perinatal causes of death, automobile accidents, and assaults by firearm.
US childhood mortality rates have lagged behind other wealthy nations for the past 50 years
In a new study of childhood mortality rates between 1961 and 2010 in the United States and 19 economically similar countries, researchers report that while there’s been overall improvement among all the countries, the U.S. has been slowest to improve.
Researchers found that childhood mortality in the U.S. has been higher than all other peer nations since the 1980s; over the 50-year study period, the U.S.’s “lagging improvement” has amounted to more than 600,000 excess deaths. (Note: In 1987 the federal vaccine court was created giving big pharma the no liability green light to add more vaccines to the CDC vaccine schedule, and in the end quadruple the number of vaccines and vaccine doses. This was just the opposite of what was needed, and intended).
A report of the findings, published Jan. 8 in Health Affairs, highlights when and why the U.S.’s performance started falling behind peer countries, and calls for continued funding of federal, state and local programs that have proven to save children’s lives.
Researchers found that childhood mortality in the U.S. has been higher than all other peer nations since the 1980s; over the 50-year study period, the U.S.’s “lagging improvement” has amounted to more than 600,000 excess deaths.
A report of the findings, published Jan. 8 in Health Affairs, highlights when and why the U.S.’s performance started falling behind peer countries, and calls for continued funding of federal, state and local programs that have proven to save children’s lives.
Among the leading causes of death for the most recent decade, the researchers say, were premature births and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Children in the U.S. were three times more likely to die from prematurity at birth and more than twice as likely to die from SIDS.
The State with the Sickest Children has the Highest Vaccination Rates
According to the comprehensive state-by-state health rankings, Mississippi has remained squarely at the bottom of the nation’s overall health rankings for decades. Mississippi’s vaccine “efficiency” is over 99.4% vaccine coverage in kindergartners, highest in the nation. This is because they do not allow parents to claim any exemptions for vaccines, one of three states that do not allow parental choice. Despite juxtaposing two critical pieces of health information about Mississippi’s children—high vaccine coverage and poor health rankings—Dr. Paul Offit, one of the vaccine industry’s most strident ambassadors, does not ask the obvious elephant-in-the-room question: Could one have something to do with the other? Offit makes it clear that he wants other states to follow Mississippi’s example and take away parental rights to make vaccine decisions.
Research References(nearly 100 study references supporting and replicating Dr Andrew Wakefield’s known 1998 Lancet, preliminary study on the on the MMR vaccinehttp://www.callous-disregard.com/research.htm
Vaccine Refusal Increasingly Being Linked to Medical Kidnapping – Violation of Civil RightsNovember 29, 2017
Michigans-Systematic-Inquisition-of-Parents-Over-Religious-Objection-to-Vaccines-Leads-to-Federal-Lawsuit-by-Thomas-MoreAuthor and research scientist Dr. James Lyons-Weiler, PhD, is concerned about doctors and Child Protective Services overruling parents who choose not to vaccinate. In a video livestreamed on the Facebook VAXXED page on the evening of Tuesday, November 28, 2017, he said: “In the United States, there is a new rash of what can only be called Medical Kidnap.” He goes on to state: “When the government acts as though they have the authority to take rights away, that’s when people need to stand up. That’s when the people, especially in the United States, have always recognized that we need to stand up. And I can’t imagine a right that is more sacred to a mom than the bonding moments that occur right after birth.” The single most damaging practice in the events surrounding childbirth is the separation of mother and baby, yet the practice is occurring with more and more frequency as hospitals threaten parents with the removal of the child for refusal to vaccinate.
The Constitutional Court in Colombia recently ruled that mandating the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine is unconstitutional. However, the precedent-setting judicial decision went beyond HPV vaccine mandates and affirmed the ethical principle of informed consent to medical risk taking. According to the Court, which is the highest judicial body tasked with interpreting that country’s Constitution, the state cannot make decisions regarding the bodily integrity of its citizens because to do so would violate human dignity. The Court stressed that decisions involving medical procedures should ultimately be made by patients themselves, not the government. It cautioned Colombia’s Ministry of Health that it “must obtain the informed consent [of patients] prior to administering the vaccine” to them.
If you think that vaccine ingredients have been proven as safe and even when combined vaccines are used, ask youR doctor for the studies? They do not exist.
Vaccine IngredientsIn the first 6 years of life your child receives the following:
• 17,500 mcg 2-phenoxyethanol (antifreeze)• 5,700 mcg aluminum (a known neurotoxin)• Unknown amounts of fetal bovine serum (aborted cow blood)• 801.6 mcg formaldehyde (carcinogen, embalming agent)• 23,250 mcg gelatin (ground up animal carcasses)• 500 mcg human albumin (human blood)• 760 mcg of monosodium L-glutamate (causes obesity & diabetis)• Unknown amounts of MRC-5 cells (aborted human babies)• Over 10 mcg neomycin (antibiotic)• Over 0.075 mcg polymyxin B (antibiotic)• Over 560 mcg polysorbate 80 (carcinogen)• 116 mcg potassium chloride (used in lethal injection to shut down the heart and stop breathing)• 188 mcg potassium phosphate (liquid fertilizer agent)• 260 mcg sodium bicarbonate (baking soda)• 70 mcg sodium borate (Borax, used for cockroach control)• 54,100 mcg of sodium chloride (table salt)• Unknown amounts of sodium citrate (food additive)• Unknown amounts of sodium hydroxide (Danger! Corrosive)• 2,800 mcg sodium phosphate (toxic to any organism)• Unknown amounts of sodium phosphate monobasic monohydrate (toxic to any organism)• 32,000 mcg sorbitol (Not to be injected)• 0.6 mcg streptomycin (antibiotic)• Over 40,000 mcg sucrose (cane sugar)• 35,000 mcg yeast protein (fungus)• 5,000 mcg urea (metabolic waste from human urine)
Most people who vaccinate their children do not realize the kind of ingredients contained in vaccines—and even if they do know, they may not fully understand what that particular ingredient does or what it means. This article is written to help those individuals better understand what they are injecting into the bodies of their loved ones.What prompted me to put this list together was the staggering number of people reporting adverse reactions to vaccines. I wanted to know why so many children experience many of the same reactions. What I found was that many of the adverse reactions fit into many of the side effects of many ingredients contained in vaccines. Please educate before you vaccinate! Don’t wait for something bad to happen before you begin researching vaccines.INGREDIENTS OF COMMON VACCINES
Influence of elemental impurities in aluminum hydroxide adjuvant on the stability of inactivated Japanese Encephalitis vaccine, IXIARO®
AbstractAluminum hydroxide is a critical raw material in the production of many vaccines. It is used as an adjuvant in the formulation of the final bulk vaccine, and for this it must meet the specifications of the European Pharmacopeia Monograph. We investigated whether vaccine stability was affected by the presence of trace amounts of elemental impurities in commercially available aluminum hydroxide. The content of residual elemental impurities in commercially available aluminum hydroxide was determined by selective and sensitive inductively coupled-plasma mass spectrometry and inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectroscopy. We found significant differences between different suppliers, but also between different lots from the same supplier. Inactivated Japanese encephalitis vaccine, IXIARO®, was used to study the effect of residual metals in aluminum hydroxide on antigen stability. We propose that antigen degradation occurred via a pathway involving the metal-catalyzed, auto-oxidation of a process-related impurity (sulfite). Thus, sulfite auto-oxidation resulted in antigen degradation when residual Cu was present at elevated concentrations in aluminum hydroxide.
Little Things Matter: The Impact of Toxins on the Developing BrainCanadian Environmental Health Atlas
We’ve been studying the impact of toxins on children for the past 30 years and reached the inescapable conclusion: little things matter. We’ve discovered that extremely low levels of toxins can impact brain development. We have also discovered that subtle shifts in the intellectual abilities of individual children have a big impact on the number of children in a population that are challenged or gifted. Steps should be taken to reduce children’s exposure to toxins or suspected toxins. You can read more about how toxins impact brain development and the supportive documentation for this video here:
The Impact of Toxins on the Developing BrainAnnual Review of Public Health
Abstract
The impact of toxins on the developing brain is usually subtle for an individual child, but the damage can be substantial at the population level. Numerous challenges must be addressed to definitively test the impact of toxins on brain development in children: We must quantify exposure using a biologic marker or pollutant; account for an ever-expanding set of potential confounders; identify critical windows of vulnerability; and repeatedly examine the association of biologic markers of toxins with intellectual abilities, behaviors, and brain function in distinct cohorts. Despite these challenges, numerous toxins have been implicated in the development of intellectual deficits and mental disorders in children. Yet, too little has been done to protect children from these ubiquitous but insidious toxins. The objective of this review is to provide an overview on the population impact of toxins on the developing brain and describe implications for public health.
Dirty Vaccines: New Study Reveals Prevalence of Contaminants
Every Human Vaccine Tested Was Contaminated by Unsafe Levels of Metals and Debris Linked to Cancer and Autoimmune Disease, New Study Reports
Researchers examining 44 samples of 30 different vaccines found dangerous contaminants, including red blood cells in one vaccine and metal toxicants in every single sample tested – except in one animal vaccine.
Using extremely sensitive new technologies not used in vaccine manufacturing, Italian scientists reported they were “baffled” by their discoveries which included single particles and aggregates of organic debris including red cells of human or possibly animal origin and metals including lead, tungsten, gold, and chromium, that have been linked to autoimmune disease and leukemia.
In the study, published this week in the International Journal of Vaccines and Vaccination, the researchers led by Antonietta Gatti, of the National Council of Research of Italy and the Scientific Director of Nanodiagnostics, say their results “show the presence of micro- and nano-sized particulate matter composed of inorganic elements in vaccine samples” not declared in the products’ ingredients lists.
Lead particles were found in the cervical cancer vaccines, Gardasil and Cervarix, for example, and in the seasonal flu vaccine Aggripal manufactured by Novartis as well as in the Meningetec vaccine meant to protect against meningitis C.
Samples of an infant vaccine called Infarix Hexa (against diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, hepatitis B, poliomyelitis and haemophilus influenzae type B) manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline was found to contain stainless steel, tungsten and a gold-zinc aggregate.
Other metal contaminants included platinum, silver, bismuth, iron, and chromium. Chromium (alone or in alloy with iron and nickel) was identified in 25 of the human vaccines from Italy and France that were tested.
GSK’s Fluarix vaccine for children three years and older contained 11 metals and aggregates of metals. Similar aggregates to those identified in the vaccines have been shown to be prevalent in cases of leukemia, the researchers noted.
Many of the vaccines contained iron and iron alloys which, according to the researchers, “can corrode and the corrosion products exert a toxicity affecting the tissues”.
The U.S. Centers For Disease Control – A History of Corruption(actually the CDC is not even part of the US government, it is its own entity and falsely assumed as an authority figure)
The recent controversy over the documentary “Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe,” despite being attacked by so many who haven’t seen it, is bringing public attention to real life episodes of vaccine damaged children and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) whistleblower Dr. William Thompson’s attempt to reveal fraud in the CDC. But this accurate CDC episode reveals only one episode of hiding data to deal disinformation publicly that doesn’t support vaccine safety. There have been several other vaccine report cover-ups and other types of fraudulent activity in addition to the Dr. Thompson whistleblower episode. They all support the need to dismantle the bloated budgetary expanse of CDC headquarters and activities. The CDC’s financial waste was investigated in great detail by Senator Tom Coburn in 2007, unfortunately nothing substantial came of his work. The CDC keeps demanding and getting more funding. We’ll start from the most recent discovery of lies and cover-ups and work back chronologically to earlier episodes of CDC outright blatant deception and fraud that serve to protect various industries instead of the people that are harmed by pharmaceutical interventions, especially vaccines.
The group, which claimed to represent scientists across the CDC’s diverse branches, calls itself SPIDER (Scientists Preserving Integrity, Diligence and Ethics in Research). The letter to CDC Chief of Staff, Carmen Villar, expressed alarm “about the current state of ethics at our agency.” The scientists complained that “our mission is being influenced and shaped by outside parties and rogue interests” and “circumvented by some of our leaders.”
The scientists told Villar that, “questionable and unethical practices, occurring at all levels and in all of our respective units, threaten to undermine our credibility and reputation as a trusted leader in public health.” The letter charged that staff level scientists “are intimidated and pressed to do things they know are not right,” and that, “Senior management officials at CDC are clearly aware and even condone these behaviors.”
This letter is to serve as notification that ____________________________ and ___________________________, the parents of __________________________, born __________, ___, 20___, are exercising our right to a religious waiver on all future childhood vaccinations because we find them to be in extreme violations of our personal religious beliefs.
The following are ways in which these violations manifest themselves in the vaccinations recommended by the Center for Disease Control.
The use of cells, cellular debris, protein, and DNA from willfully aborted human children found in Adenovirus, Polio, Dtap/Polio/HiB Combo, Hep A, Hep A/Hep B Combo, MMR, MMRV Pro Quad, Rabies, Varicella, and the Shingles vaccines violate the very basic commands found in Exodus 20:13 and Deuteronomy 5:15 which instructs us to not murder. The following ingredients were derived from no fewer than 107 human souls who were sacrificed for social reasons and then used in past and ongoing vaccine research: PER C6, HEK293, WI-38 (RA 27/3), WI-1, WI-2, WI-3, WI-4, WI-5, WI-6, WI-7, WI-8, WI-9, WI-10, WI-11, WI-12, WI-13, WI-14, WI-15, WI-16, WI-17, WI-18, WI-19, WI-20, WI-21, WI-22, WI-23, WI-24, WI-25, WI-26, WI-27, WI-38, WI-44, and MCR-5 plus many other ingredients obtained from human children not required to be listed by FDA guidelines. Supporting vaccinations and vaccination developments is an endorsement of the sacrifice of those and the continuing sacrifice of other human souls.
Genesis 4:1, 17 and Jeremiah 1:5 demonstrate that the deceased children used in the aforementioned vaccinations were recognized by God as human souls from the point of conception in the same way that we, as parents, recognized our child as a human from the moment we were aware of his/her presence in his/her mother’s wombs.
Genesis 1:27 – 28, 4:1, 2 Kings 17:17-18, Psalm 22:10-11, 106: 35, 37-38, 113:7-9, 127:3, 139:13-16, Amos 1:13, Matthew 18:1-4, and Matthew 19:13-15 are just a few verses that illustrate the aforementioned children as blessings from God that are valued and loved by him, their Creator, in whose image they were created and that their killing is condemned and causes God’s destructive anger to burn against their murderers and those complicit in those murders.
Exodus 20:13, Leviticus 18:21 & 20:2-5, Deuteronomy 5:13, 12:30-32, 18:10, 2 Kings 16:3, and Psalm 106:38 illustrate that all child sacrifice is condemned with no exception clauses allowing for the greater good or public exception clauses found anywhere in the sacred scriptures.
1 Corinthians 6:19-20 and 10:31 remind us that we are to regard our bodies a temples of God’s Holy Spirit and that we are to honor God, our Creator and possessor of our very bodies by not defiling them. Notwithstanding the presence of socially sacrificed human cells and debris in vaccinations, we firmly believe that the presence of neurotoxins, hazardous substances, attenuated viruses, animal cells, foreign DNA, albumin from human blood, carcinogens, and chemical wastes is in strict violation of our imperative to treat our bodies as holy temples of the very Spirit of God.
Genesis 9:4, Leviticus 17:10-11, 17:14, Deuteronomy 12:23, Acts 15:20 and 29 informs us that blood represents the life force of human and animal species and that human blood was to be kept pure under all circumstances and free from contaminants such as animal cells, parts, and blood.We thank you for respectfully adhering to our first amendment rights guaranteed as citizens of the United States of America by her great Constitution and reinforced on a state level by the fourteenth amendment without prejudice.
State of _________________________________, ________________________ County
I,_________________________________, a Notary Public for said County and State, do hereby certify that ____________________________ and _________________________________personally appeared before me this day and acknowledged the due execution of the foregoing instrument.
Witness my hand and official seal, this the ______ day of ______________, 20 ____.
It may not do any harm at all, especially if it has been well heated in the soup!
However, all injected substances including insect fragments bypass the body’s intricate defense mechanism. The same substances which are harmless when ingested are shown to be extremely detrimental to health when injected. This is learned by medical students and others, but many doctors, health authorities and other vaccine promoters appear to ignore this basic fact.
The polio vaccine: a critical assessment of its arcane history, efficacy, and long-term health-related consequencesNeil Z. Miller – Thinktwice Global Vaccine Institute http://www.thinktwice.com/Polio.pdf
College Student Gets HPV Cancer After Receiving Gardasil Vaccine
The VAXXED film crew recently interviewed Erin Crawford in Nashville about her experience with the HPV vaccine. Erin was a completely healthy college student who was asked to take Gardasil as part of a trial. Within 24 hours she was violently sick, vomiting, and went on to develop cervical cancer within 18 months, the very thing the vaccine was supposed to protect her from.
Interview with Gardasil Survivor Erin CrawfordHear Gardasil survivor Erin Crawford tell her story of vaccine injury and recovery at the First International Gardasil Conference.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opfst-T52u8
Actually, this is not new news, but very important and yet entirely ignored news; and that by the CDC and FDA. They simply say there is no evidence and/or scientific proof of any harm done. The truth is that they have never in any honesty looked for that evidence, and nor has any scientific study into it all, ever been done
The CDC would have us believe this is all a coincidence and proven as not connected and nor related to the vaccines. They know that they are lying. They and big pharma have as well zero legal liability for any of this, and now since 1987. There is nothing existing that requires and/or that would force them to admit to the obvious truth.
Dr. Maurice Hilleman Former Merck Vaccine Chief Confesses Cancer & other Viruses is found in Vaccines,(and they laugh about it?)http://youtu.be/vgBBwOnmy3w
The LancetAssociation between simian virus 40 and non-Hodgkin lymphoma
Findings
Polyomavirus T antigen sequences, all of which were SV40-specific, were detected in 64 (42%) of 154 non-Hodgkin lymphomas, none of 186 non-malignant lymphoid samples, and none of 54 control cancers. This difference was similar for HIV-1-infected patients and HIV-1-uninfected patients alike. Few tumours were positive for both SV40 and Epstein-Barr virus. Human herpesvirus type 8 was not detected. SV40 sequences were found most frequently in diffuse large B-cell and follicular-type lymphomas.
Interpretation
SV40 is significantly associated with some types of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. These results add lymphomas to the types of human cancers associated with SV40.
To date, the prevalence of SV40 infections in humans is not known. Recent studies, based on PCR and serological techniques, indicate that SV40 infection occurs both in children and adults. (i) SV40 DNA sequences have been detected in normal and neoplastic tissues of people either too young (1 to 30 years) or too old (60 to 85 years) to have been vaccinated with SV40-contaminated anti-polio vaccines [19,33,76-81]. This finding may also explain the lack of difference in cancer incidence between individuals vaccinated with SV40-contaminated and SV40-free anti-polio vaccines [82]. (ii) SV40 sequences and Tag were detected in blood and sperm specimens from normal individuals and oncologic patients [80,81,83-88] and in lymphoblastoid cells [32]. These results suggest that (peripheral blood mononuclear cells) PBMCs, could be a reservoir and vehicle of SV40 spreading in the tissues of the host and among the individuals. (iii) SV40 sequences were found in urine and stoole samples, from children and adults [84,89,90], indicating that the haematic, sexual and orofecal routes of transmission are likely to be responsible for SV40 horizontal infection in humans.
Advances in Virus Research, Volume 50Pages 83 and 84
Excerpted:
Moreover, blood and sperm fluid may represent important means for spreading of SV40 in humans.
Indeed in these investigations, (Martini etal;, 1995,1996) 61% of the neoplastic patients positive for SV 40 sequences were of an age excluding exposure to SV 40-contaminated polio vaccines, suggesting contagious transmission of SV 40 by horizontal infection.
“- many of the contaminant organisms can pass from generation to generation. For example, new studies have found that SV-40, a major contaminant of the polio vaccine until 1963, not only existed as a latent virus for the lifetime of those exposed to the vaccine but was being passed on to the next generation, primarily by way of sperm, something called vertical transmission. This means that every generation from now on will be infected with this known carcinogenic virus. There is also compelling evidence that some polio vaccines manufactured after 1963 may contain SV-40 virus. What makes the SV-40 contamination disaster of such concern is its association with so many cancers…” http://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/if-you-are-in-support-of-vaccinations/
“ – It is impossible to remove DNA contaminants from vaccines. Although weight limits for contaminating DNA were set by the FDA as far back as 1986, vaccine makers have never been able to reach that goal. The CDC decided to limit their weight recommendation to cancerous cell lines and then increase the other DNA contamination allowance one hundred-fold. However, these limits are only “recommendations” and, therefore, the FDA is unable to enforce them. Vaccine manufacturers continue to have the freedom to take scientific measures to reduce contaminants only if they wish.
Issues Associated With Residual Cell-Substrate DNA(I found Explorer worked to download this unbelievable read, and chrome did not)
(Page 20 and 47 mention the said WHO limit of 10ng of human DNA in a vaccine. But many of the current vaccines are produced with said human diploid tissue, and so what then? No mention of that issue appeared to have been made. As well see their reference made as to ongogenic activity, and infective activity. Obviously they do not have any actual and nor sufficient animal and nor human studies on and in regard to this said issue. What they have is literally only presumed estimates. The FDA thus clearly knows of the cancer causing potential, inffective potential, and of the unknown potential to create both known and unknown adverse health situations with these contaminated vaccines; such as autoimmune disease as well.)
“- Many novel vaccines are produced in animal cell substrates, and emerging infectious diseases may theoretically be transmitted from animals to humans through these vaccines. The challenge of identifying potential adventitious agents in vaccines closely parallels the challenge of identifying the agents causing particular emerging infectious diseases.” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2631857/pdf/11485673.pdf
Again, here go; two of the most important vaccine related articles you will ever find.
INDESCRIBABLY DISGUSTING VACCINE INGREDIENTS
SO WHAT ABOUT THE FLY IN OUR SOUP?
It may not do any harm at all, especially if it has been well heated in the soup!
However, all injected substances including insect fragments bypass the body’s intricate defense mechanism. The same substances which are harmless when ingested are shown to be extremely detrimental to health when injected. This is learned by medical students and others, but many doctors, health authorities and other vaccine promoters appear to ignore this basic fact.
This author realized years ago that inoculations caused the transformation of IgA into IgE; however, thanks to researcher Patrick Jordan finding the NATO Life Sciences book entitled “Immunological Adjuvants and Vaccines” (6), it has now been revealed that it is the aluminum which is put into vaccines as an adjuvant which causes production of IgE…the antibody of allergy and anaphylactic shock. This shocking admission comes in this book after the statement on page 6 that aluminum “was introduced in 1926, before strict control by regulatory authorities was practiced; whether it would be allowed by regulatory authorities today is far from certain”.
On page 37 of this NATO book, it states that studies demonstrate that “aluminum causes stimulation of the production of anaphylactic antibody (IgE) in the mouse”, and that “the effect of aluminum on the IgE response in humans does not appear to have been investigated”. This is just like the statement in the package insert of all vaccines (including the Gardasil vaccine which alleges it protects against cervical cancer) that “no studies have been done to evaluate for the potential to cause carcinogenicity or genotoxicity”. However, these experiments are being carried out in children every time they are inoculated with disease…and the skyrocketing allergies, anaphylactic reactions and cancer make itself evident that the inoculations are behind it all. Thanks to the book, I now have the evidence that IgE production is due to vaccines, as well as the fact that these mad scientists know exactly what they are doing. If this is not evidence of crimes against humanity, what is?
Scientific proof that vaccines can cause asthma and allergy!
And when do you think Paul Offit and the CDC will get around to addressing THIS study?
Vaccine. 2008 Mar 25;26(14):1725-30. doi: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2008.01.041. Epub 2008 Feb 13.Kinetics of asthma- and allergy-associated immune response gene expression in peripheral blood mononuclear cells from vaccinated infants after in vitro re-stimulation with vaccineantigen.Lahdenperä AI1, Nilsson LJ, Regnström K.
Abstract
The global expression of immune response genes in infants after vaccination and their role in asthma and allergy is not clearly understood. Pharmacogenomics is ideally suited to study the involved cellular responses, since the expression of thousands of genes can be assessed simultaneously. Here, array technology was used to assess the expression kinetics of immune response genes with association to asthma and allergy in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) of five healthy infants after vaccination with Infanrix-Polio+Hib. At 12h after in vitro re-stimulation of the PBMC with pertussis toxin (PT) antigen, 14 immune response pathways, 33 allergy-related and 66 asthma-related genes were found activated.
CDC Data Supports Causal Relationship between Vaccines and Diabetes; Diabetics Begin Seeking Legal Counsel Before Their Right to Compensation Expires; Vaccines Proven to be Largest Cause of Insulin Dependent Diabetes in Childrenhttp://www.cmu.edu/CSR/case_studies/vaccine_diabetes_yes.html
BMJ. 1999 Oct 23; 319(7217): 1133.PMCID: PMC1116914Association between type 1 diabetes and Hib vaccineCausal relation is likelyJ Barthelow Classen, presidentClassen Immunotherapieshttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1116914/
Allergens in Vaccines Are Causing Life-Threatening Food Allergiesby Claire Dwoskin – Children’s Medical Safety Research Institute
It would probably surprise few people to hear that food allergies are increasingly common in U.S. children and around the world. According to one public health website, food allergies in children aged 0-17 in the U.S. increased by 50% from 1997 to 2011.
Although food allergies are now so widespread as to have become almost normalized, it is important to realize that millions of American children and adults suffer from severe rapid-onset allergic reactions that can be life-threatening. Foods represent the most common cause of anaphylaxis among children and adolescents. The United Kingdom has witnessed a 700% increase in hospital admissions for anaphylaxis and a 500% increase in admissions for food allergysince 1990.
The question that few are asking is why life-threatening food allergies have become so alarmingly pervasive. A 2015 open access case report by Vinu Arumugham in the Journal of Developing Drugs, entitled “Evidence that Food Proteins in Vaccines Cause the Development of Food Allergies and Its Implications for Vaccine Policy,” persuasively argues that allergens in vaccines—and specifically food proteins—may be the elephant in the room.
Historical PerspectiveAllergens in VaccinesSynergy with aluminum-based adjuvantsImplications
Case Report – Open AccessEvidence that Food Proteins in Vaccines Cause the Development of Food Allergies and Its Implications for Vaccine Policy
Abstract
Nobel Laureate Charles Richet demonstrated over a hundred years ago that injecting a protein into animals or humans causes immune system sensitization to that protein. Subsequent exposure to the protein can result in allergic reactions or anaphylaxis. This fact has since been demonstrated over and over again in humans and animal models. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) confirmed that food proteins in vaccines cause food allergy, in its 2011 report on vaccine adverse events. The IOM’s confirmation is the latest and most authoritative since Dr. Richet’s discovery. Many vaccines and injections contain food proteins. Many studies since 1940 have demonstrated that food proteins in vaccines cause sensitization in humans. Allergens in vaccines are not fully disclosed. No safe dosage level for injected allergens has been established. As a result, allergen quantities in vaccines and injections are not regulated. Allergen quantities in vaccine excipients are also not regulated. It has been demonstrated that a smaller quantity of allergen is needed to cause sensitization than elicitation. It is well recognized that many currently approved vaccines have enough allergen to cause anaphylaxis. Therefore, they contain more than enough allergen to cause sensitization. Children today have fewer childhood infectious diseases. They have less exposure to helminths. C-section birth rates have increased in the last few decades by 50%. C-section births are known to result in sub-optimal gut micro biome in the newborn. All the above result in an immune imbalance biased towards atopy. Vaccine schedules today include 30-40 shots. Up to five shots may be simultaneously administered in one sitting. Vaccines contain adjuvants such as pertussis toxins and aluminum compounds that also bias towards allergy. Adjuvants also increase the immunogenicity of injected food proteins. This combination of atopic children and food protein injection along with adjuvants, contributes to millions developing lifethreatening food allergies. Given the scale and severity of the food allergy epidemic, urgent action is needed to change vaccine policy concerning vaccine specifications, manufacture, vaccine package insert documentation requirements, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and the National Vaccine Injury compensation program. Many researchers have called for the removal of food proteins from vaccines and re-evaluation of adjuvants such as aluminum compounds. In the interim, food allergy warnings can be included in vaccine package inserts. Simultaneous administration of multiple vaccines can be stopped to avoid the combined negative effects of multiple food proteins and adjuvants.
Aluminum Induced Immunoexcitotoxicity in Neurodevelopmental and Neurodegenerative DisordersCurrent Inorganic Chemistry 2012, Vol. 2, No. 1Russell L. Blaylock, MD Visiting Professor Biology Belhaven University Theoretical Neurosciences Research, LLC Ridgeland, Mississippi, USAThis article has 85 references
Abstract
A great deal has been learned about the neurotoxicity of aluminum over the past two decades in terms of its ability to disrupt cellular function. Newer evidence suggests that a more central pathophysiological mechanism may be responsible for much of the toxicity of aluminum and aluminofluoride compounds on the brain. This mechanism involves activation of the brainâ € ™ s innate immune system, primarily the microglia, with a release of neurotoxic concentrations of excitotoxins and pro-inflammatory cytokines, chemokines and immune mediators. A large number of studies suggest that excitotoxicity plays a significant role in the neurotoxic action of a number of metals, including aluminum. Recently, researchers have found that while most of the chronic neurodegenerative effects of these metals are secondary to prolonged inflammation, it is the enhancement of excitotoxicity by the immune mediators that is responsible for most of the metalâ € ™ s toxicity. This enhancement occurs via a crosstalk between cytokine receptors and glutamate receptors. The author coined the name immunoexcitotoxicity to describe this process. This paper reviews the evidence linking immunoexcitotoxicity to aluminums neurotoxic effects.
Autism Spectrum Disorders and Aluminum Vaccine AdjuvantsLucija Tomljenovic, Russell L. Blaylock, Christopher A. Shaw
AbstractImpaired brain function, excessive inflammation, and autoimmune manifestations are common in autism. Aluminum (Al), the most commonly used vaccine adjuvant, is a demonstrated neurotoxin and a strong immune stimulator. Hence, adjuvant Al has the necessary properties to induce neuroimmune disorders. Because peripheral immune stimuli in the postnatal period can compromise brain development and cause permanent neurological impairments, the possibility that such outcomes could also occur with administration of Al vaccine adjuvants needs to be considered. In regard to the risk of adjuvant toxicity in children, the following should be noted: (i) children should not be viewed as “small adults” as their unique physiology makes them more vulnerable to toxic insults; (ii) in adult humans Al adjuvants can cause a variety of serious autoimmune and inflammatory conditions including those affecting the brain, yet children are routinely exposed to much higher amounts of Al from vaccines than adults; (iii) compelling evidence has underscored the tight connection between the development of the immune system and that of the brain. Thus, it appears plausible that disruptions of critical events in immune development may also play a role in the establishment of neurobehavioral disorders; (iv) the same immune system components that play key roles in brain development appear to be targeted for impairment by Al adjuvants. In summary, research data suggests that vaccines containing Al may be a contributing etiological factor in the increasing incidence of autism.
Journal of American Nutraceutical Association 6: 21-35, 2003.Interaction of Cytokines, Excitotoxins, and Reactive Nitrogen and Oxygen Species in Autism Spectrum Disorders, Russell Blaylock, MD* Medical Director, Advanced Nutritional Concepts Ridgeland, Mississippi
ABSTRACT
There is growing and compelling evidence that excessive peripheral as well as central immune activation of brain microglia can result in alterations in brain growth and connectivity during rapid brain growth, the so-called “brain growth spurt.” A considerable amount of evidence, presented in this paper, demonstrates the deleterious effects of immune factors, such as cytokines, chemokines, and excitotoxins, when present in excess. The interaction between excitotoxicity, ROS and RNS injury and immune dysfunction is discussed. It is concluded that excessive activation of the brain’s immune system during critical growth periods can occur when vaccines are given as combination vaccines, using schedules that are too close together or by the use of certain live viruses in the vaccines.
Session 22, The Vaccine Safety Conference: Dr. Russell Blaylock, MD, CCNTHE CENTRAL ROLE OF IMMUNOEXCITOTOXICITY IN ALUMINUM AND MERCURY-CONTAINING ADJUVANT-TRIGGERED NEURODEVELOPMENTAL AND NEURODEGENERATIVE DISORDERShttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9DkcpEEBPI
Republican Tim Nolan, chairman of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in Kentucky, pled guilty to child sex trafficking and on February 11, 2018 he was sentenced to serve 20 years in prison.
Republican state Senator Ralph Shortey was indicted on four counts of human trafficking and child pornography. In November 2017, he pleaded guilty to one count of child sex trafficking in exchange for the dropping of the other charges.
Republican anti-abortion activist Howard Scott Heldreth is a convicted child rapist in Florida.
Republican County Commissioner David Swartz pleaded guilty to molesting two girls under the age of 11 and was sentenced to 8 years in prison. Republican judge Mark Pazuhanich pleaded no contest to fondling a 10-year old girl and was sentenced to 10 years probation.
Republican anti-abortion activist Nicholas Morency pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography on his computer and offering a bounty to anybody who murders an abortion doctor.
Republican legislator Edison Misla Aldarondo was sentenced to 10 years in prison for raping his daughter between the ages of 9 and 17. Republican Mayor Philip Giordano is serving a 37-year sentence in federal prison for sexually abusing 8- and 10-year old girls.
Republican campaign consultant Tom Shortridge was sentenced to three years probation for taking nude photographs of a 15-year old girl. Republican Senator Strom Thurmond, a notable racist, had sex with a 15-year old black girl which produced a child.
Republican pastor Mike Hintz, whom George W. Bush commended during the 2004 presidential campaign, surrendered to police after admitting to a sexual affair with a female juvenile.
Republican legislator Peter Dibble pleaded no contest to having an inappropriate relationship with a 13-year-old girl.
Republican Congressman Donald “Buz” Lukens was found guilty of having sex with a female minor and sentenced to one month in jail.
Republican fundraiser Richard A. Delgaudio was found guilty of child porn charges and paying two teenage girls to pose for sexual photos.
Republican activist Mark A. Grethen convicted on six counts of sex crimes involving children.
Republican activist Randal David Ankeney pleaded guilty to attempted sexual assault on a child.
Republican Congressman Dan Crane had sex with a female minor working as a congressional page.
Republican activist and Christian Coalition leader Beverly Russell admitted to an incestuous relationship with his step daughter.
Republican congressman and anti-gay activist Robert Bauman was charged with having sex with a 16-year-old boy he picked up at a gay bar.
Republican Committee Chairman Jeffrey Patti was arrested for distributing a video clip of a 5-year-old girl being raped.
Republican activist Marty Glickman (a.k.a. “Republican Marty”), was taken into custody by Florida police on four counts of unlawful sexual activity with an underage girl and one count of delivering the drug LSD.
Republican legislative aide Howard L. Brooks was charged with molesting a 12-year old boy and possession of child pornography.
Republican Senate candidate John Hathaway was accused of having sex with his 12-year old baby sitter and withdrew his candidacy after the allegations were reported in the media.
Republican preacher Stephen White, who demanded a return to traditional values, was sentenced to jail after offering $20 to a 14-year-old boy for permission to perform oral sex on him.
Republican talk show host Jon Matthews pleaded guilty to exposing his genitals to an 11 year old girl.Republican anti-gay activist Earl “Butch”
Kimmerling was sentenced to 40 years in prison for molesting an 8-year old girl after he attempted to stop a gay couple from adopting her.
Republican Party leader Paul Ingram pleaded guilty to six counts of raping his daughters and served 14 years in federal prison.
Republican election board official Kevin Coan was sentenced to two years probation for soliciting sex over the internet from a 14-year old girl.
Republican politician Andrew Buhr was charged with two counts of first degree sodomy with a 13-year old boy.
Republican politician Keith Westmoreland was arrested on seven felony counts of lewd and lascivious exhibition to girls under the age of 16 (i.e. exposing himself to children).
Republican anti-abortion activist John Allen Burt was charged with sexual misconduct involving a 15-year old girl.
Republican County Councilman Keola Childs pleaded guilty to molesting a male child.
Republican activist John Butler was charged with criminal sexual assault on a teenage girl.Republican candidate Richard Gardner admitted to molesting his two daughters.
Republican Councilman and former Marine Jack W. Gardner was convicted of molesting a 13-year old girl.
Republican County Commissioner Merrill Robert Barter pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual contact and assault on a teenage boy.
Republican City Councilman Fred C. Smeltzer, Jr. pleaded no contest to raping a 15 year-old girl and served 6-months in prison.
Republican activist Parker J. Bena pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography on his home computer and was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison and fined $18,000.
Republican parole board officer and former Colorado state representative, Larry Jack Schwarz, was fired after child pornography was found in his possession.
Republican strategist and Citadel Military College graduate Robin Vanderwall was convicted in Virginia on five counts of soliciting sex from boys and girls over the internet.
Republican city councilman Mark Harris, who is described as a “good military man” and “church goer,” was convicted of repeatedly having sex with an 11-year-old girl and sentenced to 12 years in prison.
Republican businessman Jon Grunseth withdrew his candidacy for Minnesota governor after allegations surfaced that he went swimming in the nude with four underage girls, including his daughter.
Republican director of the “Young Republican Federation” Nicholas Elizondo molested his 6-year old daughter and was sentenced to six years in prison.
Republican benefactor of conservative Christian groups, Richard A. Dasen Sr., was charged with rape for allegedly paying a 15-year old girl for sex. Dasen, 62, who is married with grown children and several grandchildren, has allegedly told police that over the past decade he paid more than $1 million to have sex with a large number of young women.
Democratic Illinois State Representative, Keith Farnham, has resigned and was charged with possession of child pornography and has been accused of bragging at an online site about sexually molesting a 6-year-old girl.
Democratic spokesperson for the Arkansas Democratic Party, Harold Moody, Jr, was charged with distribution and possession of child pornography.
Democratic Radnor Township Board of Commissioners member, Philip Ahr, resigned from his position after being charged with possession of child pornography and abusing children between 2 and 6 years-old.
Democratic activist and BLM organizer, Charles Wade, was arrested and charged with human trafficking and underage prostitution
Democratic Texas attorney and activist, Mark Benavides, was charged with having sex with a minor, inducing a child under 18 to have sex and compelling prostitution of at least nine legal clients and possession of child pornography. He was found guilty on six counts of sex trafficking.
Democratic Virginia Delegate, Joe Morrissey, was indicted on charges connected to his relationship with a 17-year-old girl and was charged with supervisory indecent liberties with a minor, electronic solicitation of a minor, possession of child pornography and distribution of child pornography.
Democratic Massachusetts Congressman, Gerry Studds, was censured by the House of Representatives after he admitted to an inappropriate relationship with a 17-year-old page.
Democratic Former Mayor of Stillwater, New York, Rick Nelson was plead guilty to five counts of possession of child pornography of children less than 16 years of age.
Democratic Former Mayor of Clayton, New York, Dale Kenyon, was indicted for sexual acts against a teenager.
Democratic Former Mayor of Hubbard, Ohio, Richard Keenan, was given a life sentence in jail for raping a 4-year-old girl.
Democratic Former Mayor of Winston, Oregeon, Kenneth Barrett, was arrested for setting up a meeting to have sex with a 14-year-old girl who turned out to be a police officer.
Democratic Former Mayor of Randolph, Nebraska, Dwayne L. Schutt, was arrested and charged with four counts of felony third-degree sexual assault of a child and one count of intentional child abuse.
Democratic Former Mayor of Dawson, Georgia, Christopher Wright, was indicted on the charges of aggravated child molestation, aggravated sodomy, rape, child molestation and statutory rape of an 11-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl.
Democratic Former Mayor of Stockton, California, Anthony Silva, was charged with providing alcohol to young adults during a game of strip poker that included a 16-year-old boy at a camp for underprivileged children run by the mayor.
Democratic Former Mayor of Millbrook, New York, Donald Briggs, was arrested and charged with inappropriate sexual contact with a person younger than 17.
Democratic party leader for Victoria County, Texas, Stephen Jabbour, plead guilty to possession and receiving over half a million child pornographic images.
Democratic activist and fundraiser, Terrence Bean, was arrested on charges of sodomy and sex abuse in a case involving a 15-year-old boy and when the alleged victim declined to testify, and the judge dismissed the case.
Democratic Party Chairman for Davidson County, Tennessee, Rodney Mullin, resigned amid child pornography allegations.
Democratic activist, Andrew Douglas Reed, pleaded guilty to a multiple counts of 2nd-degree sexual exploitation of a minor for producing child pornography.
Democratic official from Terre Haute, Indiana, David Roberts was sentenced to federal prison for producing and possessing child pornography including placing hidden cameras in the bedrooms and bathrooms at a home he shared with two minor female victims.
Democratic California Congressman, Tony Cárdenas, is being sued in LA County for allegedly sexually abused a 16-year-old girl.
Democratic aide to Senator Barbara Boxer, Jeff Rosato, plead guilty to charges of trading in child pornography.
Democratic Alaskan State Representative, Dean Westlake, resigned from his seat after the media published a report alleging he fathered a child with a 16-year-old girl when he was 28.
Democratic New Jersey State Assemblyman, Neil Cohen, was convicted of possession and distribution of child pornography.
Democratic donor and billionaire, Jeffrey Epstein, ran an underage child sex brothel and was convicted of soliciting underage girls for prostitution.
Democratic New York Congressman, Anthony Weiner, plead guilty to transferring obscene material to a minor as part of a plea agreement for sexted and sending Twitter DMs to underage girls as young as 15.
Democratic donor, activist, and Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein is being criminally prosecuted and civilly sued for years of sexual abuse (that was well known “secret” in Hollywood) including underage sexual activities with aspiring female actresses.
Democratic activist and #metoo proponent, Asia Argento, settled a lawsuit for sexual harassment stemming from sexual activities with an underage actor.
Democratic Mayor of Racine, Wisconsin, Gary Becker, was convicted of attempted child seduction, child pornography, and other child sex crimes.
Democratic Seattle Mayor Ed Murray resigned after multiple accusations of child sexual abuse were levied against him including by family members.
Democratic activist and aid to NYC Mayor De Blasio, Jacob Schwartz was arrested on possession of 3,000+ child pornographic images.
Democratic activist and actor, Russell Simmons, was sued based on an allegation of sexual assault where he coerced an underage model for sex.
Democratic Governor of Oregon, Neil Goldschmidt, after being caught by a newspaper, publicly admitted to having a past sexual relationship with a 13-year-old girl after the statute of limitations on the rape charges had expired.
Democratic Illinois Congressman, Mel Reynolds resigned from Congress after he was convicted of statutory rape of a 16-year-old campaign volunteer.
Democratic New York Congressman, Fred Richmond, was arrested in Washington D.C. for soliciting sex from a 16-year-old boy.
Democratic activist, donor, and director, Roman Polanski, fled the country after pleading guilty to statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl. Democrats and Hollywood actors still defend him to this day, including, Whoopi Goldberg, Martin Scorcese, Woody Allen, David Lynch, Wim Wenders, Pedro Almodovar, Tilda Swinton and Monica Bellucci.
Democratic State Senator from Alaska, George Jacko, was found guilty of sexual harassment of an underage legislative page.
Democratic State Representative candidate for Colorado, Andrew Myers, was convicted for possession of child pornography and enticing children.
Democratic Illinois Congressman, Gus Savage was investigated by the Democrat-controlled House Committee on Ethics for attempting to rape an underage female Peace Corps volunteer in Zaire. The Committee concluded that while the events did occur his apology was sufficient and took no further action.
Democratic activist, donor, and spokesperson for Subway, Jared Fogle, was convicted of distribution and receipt of child pornography and traveling to engage in illicit sexual conduct with a minor.
Democratic State Department official, Carl Carey, under Hillary Clinton’s state department, was arrested on ten counts of child porn possession.
Democratic Maine Assistant Attorney General, James Cameron, was sentenced to just over 15 years in federal prison for seven counts of child porn possession, receipt and transmission.
Democratic State Department official, Daniel Rosen, under Hillary Clinton’s state department, was arrested and charged with allegedly soliciting sex from a minor over the internet.
Democratic State Department official, James Cafferty, pleaded guilty to one count of transportation of child pornography.
Democratic radio host, Bernie Ward, plead guilty to one count of sending child pornography over the Internet.Democratic deputy attorney general from California, Raymond Liddy, was arrested for possession of child pornography.
If you were murdered today, there’s only a 60% chance of police catching the person who did it. That number drops to 3% if you’re raped. 50 years ago, that number was much higher. What happened?
Despite overwhelming disapproval from the public, the war on drugs wages on and we are witnessing the inevitable materialization of a fascist police state before us.
The irony here is that no matter how much money the state steals from us to fund themselves, and no matter how many tanks or AR-15s they acquire, they are solving far fewer crimes than before.
Police aren’t getting any closer to “winning” this ridiculous and immoral war on drugs either.
So, why aren’t police solving crimes?
The answer to that question can be found by looking at where police allocate much of their time and resources.
Civil asset forfeiture pays. Busting low-level drug dealers by the dozen and confiscating their drugs, guns, cars, houses, and money pays. Writing tickets for victimless crime pays. Pulling you over for window tint, seat belts, arbitrary traveling speeds, and expired license plates; these are the things that pay, not solving crimes.
In criminal justice, clearance rates are used as a measure of crimes solved by the police. The clearance rate is calculated by dividing the number of crimes that are “cleared” (a charge being laid) by the total number of crimes recorded.
In the United States, the murder clearance rate in 1965 was more than 90 percent. Since the inception of the war on drugs, the murder clearance rate has plummetted to an average of less than 65 percent per year.
Despite the near complete erosion of the constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure, the clearance rate for murder continued its free fall. This highlights the fact that no matter how many rights are given up or freedoms diminished, police cannot guarantee your safety.
It’s not just murders that police fail to investigate, it’s rapes too.
According to the Department of Justice, there are currently over 400,000 untested rape kits collecting dust in police evidence rooms nationwide, and many other estimates suggest that this number could be as high as one million.
As a result of this horrific negligence, roughly 3% of rape cases in America are actually solved. This is in spite of the fact that many rape kits have a high chance of leading to an arrest since most rapists are career criminals who have their DNA on file.
In some cases, the victims even know who their attackers were, but they can not prosecute these criminals because the evidence has yet to be processed by police.
Arresting rapists and murderers simply falls short in the two areas police are worried about; revenue collection and keeping their inflated drug war budgets flowing.
It’s not that police are incapable of solving these crimes either; they’re just not interested in doing so.
“Take for example, homicides of police officers in the course of their duty,” University of Maryland criminologist Charles Wellfordpoints out. On paper, they’re the kind of homicide that’s hardest to solve — “they’re frequently done in communities that generally have low clearance rates … they’re stranger-to-stranger homicides, they [have] high potential of retaliation [for] witnesses.” And yet, Wellford says, they’re almost always cleared.
This is why people don’t like the police.
This lack of solving crimes coupled with the increase in shakedowns of non-violent citizens has created a rift between the rest of society and police.
“One of the consequences of the war on drugs is people have stopped looking at police as their protectors and more see them as their potential persecutors,” explains Sean Dunagan, Former DEA Senior Intelligence Specialist.
The war on drugs has driven a wedge between citizens and police. If you keep locking up millions of people for victimless crimes, eventually you’ll effect enough lives to vastly tarnish your reputation.
“The police department basically becomes the “other” to the community. Once you have that breakdown, then information stops flowing, so you don’t learn about crimes. And the only crime you become interested in is the one you can solve, which is locking up people up for using drugs,” says Ed Burns, Former Baltimore Narcotics and Homicide Detective.
Locking up drug users has proven to be quite the profitable venture.
It is much easier to walk out on the street corner and shakedown a teenager who may have an illegal plant in his pocket than it is to examine the evidence in a rape or murder case. The so-called “Private” Prisons know this and have subsequently found their niche in this immoral war on drugs.
The term Private Prison is a farce from the get-go.
A truly Private prison would not be solely funded by taxpayer dollars. These Private prisons are nothing more than a fascist mixture of state and corporate, completely dependent upon the extortion factor of the state, i.e., taxation, as a means of their corporate sustenance.
A truly Private prison would have a negative incentive to boost its population for the simple fact that it is particularly expensive to house inmates. On the contrary, these fascist, or more aptly, corporatist prisons contractually require occupancy rates of 95%-100%.
The requirement for a 95% occupancy rate creates a de facto demand for criminals. Think about that for a second; a need or demand for people to commit crimes is created by this corporatist arrangement. The implications associated with demanding people commit crimes are horrifying.
Creating a completely immoral demand for “criminals” leads to the situation in which we find ourselves today. People, who are otherwise entirely innocent, are labeled as criminals for their personal choices and thrown in cages. We are now witnessing a vicious cycle between law enforcement, who must create and arrest criminals, and the corporatist prison system which constantly demands more prisoners.
The police and prison corporations know that without the war on drugs, this windfall of money, cars, and houses — ceases to exist.
If you want to know who profits from ruining lives and throwing marijuana users in cages, we need only look at who bribes (also known as lobbies) the politicians to keep the war on drugs alive.
Below is a list of the top five industries who need you locked in a cage for possessing a plant in order to ensure their job security.
Police Unions: Coming in as the number one contributor to politicians for their votes to lock you in a cage for a plant are the police themselves. They risk taking massive pay cuts and losing all their expensive militarized toys without the war on drugs.
Private Prison Corporations: No surprise here. The corporatist prison lobby is constantly pushing for stricter laws to keep their stream of tax dollars flowing.
Pharmaceutical Corporations: The hypocrisy of marijuana remaining a Schedule 1 drug, “No Medical Use Whatsoever,” seems criminal when considering that pharmaceutical companies reproduce a chemical version of THC and are able to market and sell it as such. Ever hear of Marinol? Big pharma simply uses the force of the state to legislate out their competition; which happens to be nature.
Prison Guard Unions: The prison guard unions are another group, so scared of losing their jobs, that they would rather see thousands of non-violent and morally innocent people thrown into cages, than look for another job.
What does it say about a society who’s resolute in enacting violence against their fellow human so they can have a job to go to in the morning?
The person who wants to ingest a substance for medical or recreational reasons is not the criminal. However, the person that would kidnap, cage, or kill someone because they have a different lifestyle is a villain on many fronts.
When does this vicious cycle end?
The good news is, that the drug war’s days are numbered. Evidence of this is everywhere. States are defying the federal government and refusing to lock people in cages for marijuana. Colorado and Washington state served as a catalyst in a seemingly exponential awakening to the government’s immoral war.
Following suit were Oregon, D.C., and Alaska. Medical marijuana initiatives are becoming a constant part of legislative debates nationwide. We’ve even seen bills that would not only completely legalize marijuana, but unregulate it entirely, like corn.
As more and more states refuse to kidnap and cage marijuana users, the drug war will continue to implode. We must be resilient in this fight.
If doing drugs bothers you, don’t do drugs. When you transition from holding an opinion to using government violence to enforce your personal preference, you become the bad guy.
Palm Beach County, Florida – Journalists at the DC Post were looking through message boards that are frequented by law enforcement officers, when they found a post where one officer was causally talking about planting evidence on “mouthy drivers” and “street lawyers.”
The Post then contacted the officer and conducted an anonymous interview with him where he revealed his disturbing perspective.
The officer revealed the illegal and unethical actions that he is proud of taking on the job. The DC Post has also said that they have verified the officer’s position with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, and they have verified many of the claims that he has made.
The original post was titled “Tricks of the trade – let’s exchange!” and featured the following message:
“I have a method for getting people off the street that should not be there. Mouthy drivers, street lawyers, assholes and just anyone else trying to make my job difficult. Under my floor mat, I keep a small plastic dime baggie with Cocaine in residue. Since it’s just residue, if it is ever found during a search of my car like during an inspection, it’s easy enough to explain. It must have stuck to my foot while walking through San Castle. Anyways, no one’s going to question an empty baggie. The residue is the key because you can fully charge some asshole with possession of cocaine, heroin, or whatever just with the residue. How to get it done? “I asked Mr. DOE for his identification. And he pulled out his wallet, I observed a small plastic baggie fall out of his pocket…” You get the idea. easy, right? Best part is, those baggies can be found lots of places so you can always be ready. Don’t forget to wipe the baggie on the person’s skin after you arrest them because you want their DNA on the bag if they say you planted it or fight it in court.”
Other officers on the board responded by sharing similar stories about how they falsely arrest people who don’t adequately bow to their authority.
Later in the interview, when the officer was asked if planting evidence happened regularly within his department, he responded by saying,
“Um, yes it does, on a regular basis. Probably every day in my shift. I work nights on the Road Patrol in a rough, um, mostly black neighborhood. Planting evidence and lying in your reports are just part of the game.
Then straight from the horses mouth, the officer said that this crooked behavior was actually encouraged by the drug war. Continuing his discussion about planting evidence, the officer said,
“Yes, all the time. It is something I see a lot of, whether it was from deputies, supervisors or undercovers and even investigators. It’s almost like you have no emotion with it, that they attach the bodies to it, they’re going to be out of jail tomorrow anyway; nothing is going to happen to them anyway. One of the consequences of the war on drugs is that police officers are pressured to make large numbers of arrests, and it’s easy for some of the less honest cops to plant evidence on innocent people. The drug war inevitably leads to crooked policing — and quotas further incentivize such practices. It doesn’t help that your higherups all did the same thing when they were on the road. It’s like a neverending cycle. Like how molested children accept that as okay behavior and begin molesting children themselves.”
When asked if he would get in trouble with the police department for framing people, the officer laughed and said that this type of behavior was actually encouraged.
“Our top boss, Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, supports this behavior and has for his entire career. As with anything, it depends on who you know in our agency. Last year, we had three deputies on the TAC unit, Kevin Drummond and Jarrod Foster, get caught falsifying information for a warrant. They got a pat on the back for a job well done. Just recently, we had a deputy, I think his name was Booth. He was caught completely lying on a car crash. Back a few more years, our Sheriff was involved a massive coverup of the death of two black deputies. He hid the report for years. This is only the beginning. The Sheriff has been involved in falsification of documents and his underling, Chief Deputy Michael Gauger, has been personally involved in an overtime scandal to steal money from the Sheriff’s Office. Does our Sheriff know about this behavior? Of course he does. We have even had a judge outright accuse my agency of committing fraud upon the court in a public hearing. She was one of the ones who saw through all the lying and covering up our department does to get away with the internal crime committed by deputies on a regular basis,” he said.
Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office is no special police department, and this officer is not just a bad apple. The problems that are discussed in this interview are systematic, and they occur in every town across the country.
Just this week, we exposed a police department in Missouri whose officers were forced to make arrests or faced losing their job. This leads to otherwise innocent people being charged on a regular basis.
Also this week, the Free Thought Project conducted a report to show what happens to cops who try to expose this corruption. Several officers within the Chicago police department were threatened with “going home in a casket” for exposing this same vile practice within their ranks. via FreeThoughtProject
The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.
The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights.
Alleged police practices at Homan Square, according to those familiar with the facility who spoke out to the Guardian after its investigation into Chicago police abuse, include:
Keeping arrestees out of official booking databases.
Beating by police, resulting in head wounds.
Shackling for prolonged periods.
Denying attorneys access to the “secure” facility.
Holding people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24 hours, including people as young as 15.
At least one man was found unresponsive in a Homan Square “interview room” and later pronounced dead.
Brian Jacob Church, a protester known as one of the “Nato Three”, was held and questioned at Homan Square in 2012 following a police raid. Officers restrained Church for the better part of a day, denying him access to an attorney, before sending him to a nearby police station to be booked and charged.
“Homan Square is definitely an unusual place,” Church told the Guardian on Friday. “It brings to mind the interrogation facilities they use in the Middle East. The CIA calls them black sites. It’s a domestic black site. When you go in, no one knows what’s happened to you.”
The secretive warehouse is the latest example of Chicago police practices that echo the much-criticized detention abuses of the US war on terrorism. While those abuses impacted people overseas, Homan Square – said to house military-style vehicles, interrogation cells and even a cage – trains its focus on Americans, most often poor, black and brown.
Unlike a precinct, no one taken to Homan Square is said to be booked. Witnesses, suspects or other Chicagoans who end up inside do not appear to have a public, searchable record entered into a database indicating where they are, as happens when someone is booked at a precinct. Lawyers and relatives insist there is no way of finding their whereabouts. Those lawyers who have attempted to gain access to Homan Square are most often turned away, even as their clients remain in custody inside.
“It’s sort of an open secret among attorneys that regularly make police station visits, this place – if you can’t find a client in the system, odds are they’re there,” said Chicago lawyer Julia Bartmes.
Chicago civil-rights attorney Flint Taylor said Homan Square represented a routinization of a notorious practice in local police work that violates the fifth and sixth amendments of the constitution.
“This Homan Square revelation seems to me to be an institutionalization of the practice that dates back more than 40 years,” Taylor said, “of violating a suspect or witness’ rights to a lawyer and not to be physically or otherwise coerced into giving a statement.”
Much remains hidden about Homan Square. The Chicago police department did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about the facility. But after the Guardian published this story, the department provided a statement insisting, without specifics, that there is nothing untoward taking place at what it called the “sensitive” location, home to undercover units.
“CPD [Chicago police department] abides by all laws, rules and guidelines pertaining to any interviews of suspects or witnesses, at Homan Square or any other CPD facility. If lawyers have a client detained at Homan Square, just like any other facility, they are allowed to speak to and visit them. It also houses CPD’s Evidence Recovered Property Section, where the public is able to claim inventoried property,” the statement said, something numerous attorneys and one Homan Square arrestee have denied.
“There are always records of anyone who is arrested by CPD, and this is not any different at Homan Square,” it continued.
The Chicago police statement did not address how long into an arrest or detention those records are generated or their availability to the public. A department spokesperson did not respond to a detailed request for clarification.
When a Guardian reporter arrived at the warehouse on Friday, a man at the gatehouse outside refused any entrance and would not answer questions. “This is a secure facility. You’re not even supposed to be standing here,” said the man, who refused to give his name.
A former Chicago police superintendent and a more recently retired detective, both of whom have been inside Homan Square in the last few years in a post-police capacity, said the police department did not operate out of the warehouse until the late 1990s.
But in detailing episodes involving their clients over the past several years, lawyers described mad scrambles that led to the closed doors of Homan Square, a place most had never heard of previously. The facility was even unknown to Rob Warden, the founder of Northwestern University Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, until the Guardian informed him of the allegations of clients who vanish into inherently coercive police custody.
“They just disappear,” said Anthony Hill, a criminal defense attorney, “until they show up at a district for charging or are just released back out on the street.”
‘They were held incommunicado for much longer than I think should be permitted in this country – anywhere – but particularly given the strong constitutional rights afforded to people who are being charged with crimes,” said Sarah Gelsomino, the lawyer for Brian Jacob Church. Photograph: Phil Batta/Guardian
Jacob Church learned about Homan Square the hard way. On May 16 2012, he and 11 others were taken there after police infiltrated their protest against the Nato summit. Church says officers cuffed him to a bench for an estimated 17 hours, intermittently interrogating him without reading his Miranda rights to remain silent. It would take another three hours – and an unusual lawyer visit through a wire cage – before he was finally charged with terrorism-related offenses at the nearby 11th district station, where he was made to sign papers, fingerprinted and photographed.
In preparation for the Nato protest, Church, who is from Florida, had written a phone number for the National Lawyers Guild on his arm as a precautionary measure. Once taken to Homan Square, Church asked explicitly to call his lawyers, and said he was denied.
“Essentially, I wasn’t allowed to make any contact with anybody,” Church told the Guardian, in contradiction of a police guidance on permitting phone calls and legal counsel to arrestees.
Church’s left wrist was cuffed to a bar behind a bench in windowless cinderblock cell, with his ankles cuffed together. He remained in those restraints for about 17 hours.
“I had essentially figured, ‘All right, well, they disappeared us and so we’re probably never going to see the light of day again,’” Church said.
The Disappeared
Brian Church, Jared Chase and Brent Vincent Betterly, known as the ‘Nato Three’
Though the raid attracted major media attention, a team of attorneys could not find Church through 12 hours of “active searching”, Sarah Gelsomino, Church’s lawyer, recalled. No booking record existed. Only after she and others made a “major stink” with contacts in the offices of the corporation counsel and Mayor Rahm Emanuel did they even learn about Homan Square.
They sent another attorney to the facility, where he ultimately gained entry, and talked to Church through a floor-to-ceiling chain-link metal cage. Finally, hours later, police took Church and his two co-defendants to a nearby police station for booking.
After serving two and a half years in prison, Church is currently on parole after he and his co-defendants were found not guilty in 2014 of terrorism-related offenses but guilty of lesser charges of possessing an incendiary device and the misdemeanor of “mob action”.
It’s almost like they throw a black bag over your head and make you disappear for a day or two
-Brian Jacob Church
The access that Nato Three attorneys received to Homan Square was an exception to the rule, even if Jacob Church’s experience there was not.
Three attorneys interviewed by the Guardian report being personally turned away from Homan Square between 2009 and 2013 without being allowed access to their clients. Two more lawyers who hadn’t been physically denied described it as a place where police withheld information about their clients’ whereabouts. Church was the only person who had been detained at the facility who agreed to talk with the Guardian: their lawyers say others fear police retaliation.
One man in January 2013 had his name changed in the Chicago central bookings database and then taken to Homan Square without a record of his transfer being kept, according to Eliza Solowiej of Chicago’s First Defense Legal Aid. (The man, the Guardian understands, wishes to be anonymous; his current attorney declined to confirm Solowiej’s account.) She found out where he was after he was taken to the hospital with a head injury.
“He said that the officers caused his head injuries in an interrogation room at Homan Square. I had been looking for him for six to eight hours, and every department member I talked to said they had never heard of him,” Solowiej said. “He sent me a phone pic of his head injuries because I had seen him in a police station right before he was transferred to Homan Square without any.”
Bartmes, another Chicago attorney, said that in September 2013 she got a call from a mother worried that her 15-year-old son had been picked up by police before dawn. A sympathetic sergeant followed up with the mother to say her son was being questioned at Homan Square in connection to a shooting and would be released soon. When hours passed, Bartmes traveled to Homan Square, only to be refused entry for nearly an hour.
An officer told her, “Well, you can’t just stand here taking notes, this is a secure facility, there are undercover officers, and you’re making people very nervous,” Bartmes recalled. Told to leave, she said she would return in an hour if the boy was not released. He was home, and not charged, after “12, maybe 13” hours in custody.
On February 2, 2013, John Hubbard was taken to Homan Square. Hubbard never walked out. The Chicago Tribune reported that the 44-year old was found “unresponsive inside an interview room”, and pronounced dead. After publication, the Cook County medical examiner told the Guardian that the cause of death was determined to be heroin intoxication.
Homan Square is hardly concerned exclusively with terrorism. Several special units operate outside of it, including the anti-gang and anti-drug forces. If police “want money, guns, drugs”, or information on the flow of any of them onto Chicago’s streets, “they bring them there and use it as a place of interrogation off the books,” Hill said.
‘The real danger in allowing practices like Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib is the fact that they always creep into other aspects,’ criminologist Tracy Siska told the Guardian. Photograph: Chandler West/Guardian
A former Chicago detective and current private investigator, Bill Dorsch, said he had not heard of the police abuses described by Church and lawyers for other suspects who had been taken to Homan Square. He has been permitted access to the facility to visit one of its main features, an evidence locker for the police department. (“I just showed my retirement star and passed through,” Dorsch said.)
Transferring detainees through police custody to deny them access to legal counsel, would be “a career-ender,” Dorsch said. “To move just for the purpose of hiding them, I can’t see that happening,” he told the Guardian.
Richard Brzeczek, Chicago’s police superintendent from 1980 to 1983, who also said he had no first-hand knowledge of abuses at Homan Square, said it was “never justified” to deny access to attorneys.
“Homan Square should be on the same list as every other facility where you can call central booking and say: ‘Can you tell me if this person is in custody and where,’” Brzeczek said.
“If you’re going to be doing this, then you have to include Homan Square on the list of facilities that prisoners are taken into and a record made. It can’t be an exempt facility.”
Indeed, Chicago police guidelines appear to ban the sorts of practices Church and the lawyers said occur at Homan Square.
A directive titled “Processing Persons Under Department Control” instructs that “investigation or interrogation of an arrestee will not delay the booking process,” and arrestees must be allowed “a reasonable number of telephone calls” to attorneys swiftly “after their arrival at the first place of custody.” Another directive, “Arrestee and In-Custody Communications,” says police supervisors must “allow visitation by attorneys.”
Attorney Scott Finger said that the Chicago police tightened the latter directive in 2012 after quiet complaints from lawyers about their lack of access to Homan Square. Without those changes, Church’s attorneys might not have gained entry at all. But that tightening – about a week before Church’s arrest – did not prevent Church’s prolonged detention without a lawyer, nor the later cases where lawyers were unable to enter.
The combination of holding clients for long periods, while concealing their whereabouts and denying access to a lawyer, struck legal experts as a throwback to the worst excesses of Chicago police abuse, with a post-9/11 feel to it.
On a smaller scale, Homan Square is “analogous to the CIA’s black sites,” said Andrea Lyon, a former Chicago public defender and current dean of Valparaiso University Law School. When she practiced law in Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s, she said, “police used the term ‘shadow site’” to refer to the quasi-disappearances now in place at Homan Square.
I’ve never known any kind of organized, secret place where they go and hold somebody before booking for hours and hours
James Trainum, former detective, Washington DC
“Back when I first started working on torture cases and started representing criminal defendants in the early 1970s, my clients often told me they’d been taken from one police station to another before ending up at Area 2 where they were tortured,” said Taylor, the civil-rights lawyer most associated with pursuing the notoriously abusive Area 2 police commander Jon Burge. “And in that way the police prevent their family and lawyers from seeing them until they could coerce, through torture or other means, confessions from them.”
Police often have off-site facilities to have private conversations with their informants. But a retired Washington DC homicide detective, James Trainum, could not think of another circumstance nationwide where police held people incommunicado for extended periods.
“I’ve never known any kind of organized, secret place where they go and just hold somebody before booking for hours and hours and hours. That scares the hell out of me that that even exists or might exist,” said Trainum, who now studies national policing issues, to include interrogations, for the Innocence Project and the Constitution Project.
Regardless of departmental regulations, police frequently deny or elide access to lawyers even at regular police precincts, said Solowiej of First Defense Legal Aid. But she said the outright denial was exacerbated at Chicago’s secretive interrogation and holding facility: “It’s very, very rare for anyone to experience their constitutional rights in Chicago police custody, and even more so at Homan Square,” Solowiej said.
Church said that one of his more striking memories of Homan Square was the “big, big vehicles” police had inside the complex that “look like very large MRAPs that they use in the Middle East.”
Cook County, home of Chicago, has received some 1,700 pieces of military equipment from a much-criticized Pentagon program transferring military gear to local police. It includes a Humvee, according to a local ABC News report.
Tracy Siska, a criminologist and civil-rights activist with the Chicago Justice Project, said that Homan Square, as well as the unrelated case of ex-Guantánamo interrogator and retired Chicago detective Richard Zuley, showed the lines blurring between domestic law enforcement and overseas military operations.
“The real danger in allowing practices like Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib is the fact that they always creep into other aspects,” Siska said.
“They creep into domestic law enforcement, either with weaponry like with the militarization of police, or interrogation practices. That’s how we ended up with a black site in Chicago.”
The Big Story Torture Everyone Is Missing Senate Torture Report
While the torture report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee is very important, it doesn’t address the big scoop regarding torture.
Instead, it is the Senate Armed ServicesCommittee’s report that dropped the big bombshell regarding the U.S. torture program.
Senator Levin, commenting on a Armed Services Committee’s report on torture in 2009, explained:
The techniques are based on tactics used by Chinese Communists against American soldiers during the Korean War for the purpose of eliciting FALSE confessions for propaganda purposes. Techniques used in SERE training include stripping trainees of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, subjecting them to face and body slaps, depriving them of sleep, throwing them up against a wall, confining them in a small box, treating them like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and exposing them to extreme temperatures [and] waterboarding.
Former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration…
For most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.”
It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document…
When people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder,” he continued.” Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam . . .
A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 thatinterrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under “pressure” to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.
“While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq,” Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. “The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”
“I think it’s obvious that the administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link (between al Qaida and Iraq),” [Senator] Levin said in a conference call with reporters. “They made out links where they didn’t exist.”
Levin recalled Cheney’s assertions that a senior Iraqi intelligence officer had met Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, in the Czech Republic capital of Prague just months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The FBI and CIA found that no such meeting occurred.
Despite what you’ve seen on TV, torture is really only good at one thing: eliciting false confessions. Indeed, Bush-era torture techniques, we now know, were cold-bloodedly modeled after methods used by Chinese Communists to extract confessions from captured U.S. servicemen that they could then use for propaganda during the Korean War.
So as shocking as the latest revelation in a new Senate Armed Services Committee report may be, it actually makes sense — in a nauseating way. The White House started pushing the use of torture not when faced with a “ticking time bomb” scenario from terrorists, but whenofficials in 2002 were desperately casting about for ways to tie Iraq to the 9/11 attacks — in order to strengthen their public case for invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 at all.
***
Gordon Trowbridge writes for the Detroit News: “Senior Bush administration officials pushed for the use of abusive interrogations of terrorism detainees in part to seek evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq, according to newly declassified information discovered in a congressional probe.
Colin Powell’s former chief of staff (Colonel Larry Wilkerson) wrote in 2009 that the Bush administration’s “principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qaeda.”
Indeed, one of the two senior instructors from the Air Force team which taught U.S. servicemen how to resist torture by foreign governments when used to extract false confessions has blown the whistle on the true purpose behind the U.S. torture program.
[Torture architect] Jessen’s notes were provided to Truthout by retired Air Force Capt. Michael Kearns, a “master” SERE instructor and decorated veteran who has previously held high-ranking positions within the Air Force Headquarters Staff and Department of Defense (DoD).
***
The Jessen notes clearly state the totality of what was being reverse-engineered – not just ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ but an entire program of exploitation of prisoners using torture as a central pillar,” he said. “What I think is important to note, as an ex-SERE Resistance to Interrogation instructor, is the focus of Jessen’s instruction. It is EXPLOITATION, not specifically interrogation. And this is not a picayune issue, because if one were to ‘reverse-engineer’ a course on resistance to exploitation then what one would get is a plan to exploit prisoners, not interrogate them. The CIA/DoD torture program appears to have the same goals as the terrorist organizations or enemy governments for which SV-91 and other SERE courses were created to defend against: the full exploitation of the prisoner in his intelligence, propaganda, or other needs held by the detaining power, such as the recruitment of informers and double agents. Those aspects of the US detainee program have not generally been discussed as part of the torture story in the American press.”
Air Force Col. Steven Kleinman, a career military intelligence officer recognized as one of the DOD’s most effective interrogators as well a former SERE instructor and director of intelligence for JPRA’s teaching academy, said …. “This is the guidebook to getting false confessions, a system drawn specifically from the communist interrogation model that was used to generate propaganda rather than intelligence” …. “If your goal is to obtain useful and reliable information this is not the source book you should be using.”
Much of the 9/11 Commission Report was based upon the testimony of people who were tortured
At least four of the people whose interrogation figured in the 9/11 Commission Report have claimed that they told interrogators information as a way to stop being “tortured.”
The 9/11 Commission itself doubted the accuracy of the torture confessions, and yet kept their doubts to themselves
Today, Raymond McGovern – a 27-year CIA veteran, who chaired National Intelligence Estimates and personally delivered intelligence briefings to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, their Vice Presidents, Secretaries of State, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many other senior government officials –provides details about one torture victim (Al-Libi) at former Newsweek and AP reporter Robert Parry’s website:
But if it’s bad intelligence you’re after, torture works like a charm. If, for example, you wish to “prove,” post 9/11, that “evil dictator” Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda and might arm the terrorists with WMD, bring on the torturers.
It is a highly cynical and extremely sad story, but many Bush administration policymakers wanted to invade Iraq before 9/11 and thus were determined to connect Saddam Hussein to those attacks. The PR push began in September 2002 – or as Bush’s chief of staff Andrew Card put it, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”
By March 2003 – after months of relentless “marketing” – almost 70 percent of Americans had been persuaded that Saddam Hussein was involved in some way with the attacks of 9/11.
The case of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, a low-level al-Qaeda operative, is illustrative of how this process worked. Born in Libya in 1963, al-Libi ran an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan from 1995 to 2000. He was detained in Pakistan on Nov. 11, 2001, and then sent to a U.S. detention facility in Kandahar, Afghanistan. He was deemed a prize catch, since it was thought he would know of any Iraqi training of al-Qaeda.
The CIA successfully fought off the FBI for first rights to interrogate al-Libi. FBI’s Dan Coleman, who “lost” al-Libi to the CIA (at whose orders, I wonder?), said, “Administration officials were always pushing us to come up with links” between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
CIA interrogators elicited some “cooperation” from al-Libi through a combination of rough treatment and threats that he would be turned over to Egyptian intelligence with even greater experience in the torture business.
By June 2002, al-Libi had told the CIA that Iraq had “provided” unspecified chemical and biological weapons training for two al-Qaeda operatives, an allegation that soon found its way into other U.S. intelligence reports. Al-Libi’s treatment improved as he expanded on his tales about collaboration between al-Qaeda and Iraq, adding that three al-Qaeda operatives had gone to Iraq “to learn about nuclear weapons.”
Al-Libi’s claim was well received at the White House even though the Defense Intelligence Agency was suspicious.
“He lacks specific details” about the supposed training, the DIA observed. “It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers. Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest.”
Meanwhile, at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, Maj. Paul Burney, a psychiatrist sent there in summer 2002, told the Senate, “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq and we were not successful. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link … there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”
***
President Bush relied on al-Libi’s false Iraq allegation for a major speech in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002, just a few days before Congress voted on the Iraq War resolution. Bush declared, “We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases.”
And Colin Powell relied on it for his famous speech to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, declaring: “I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these [chemical and biological] weapons to al-Qaeda. Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story.”
Al-Libi’s “evidence” helped Powell as he sought support for what he ended up calling a “sinister nexus” between Iraq and al-Qaeda, in the general effort to justify invading Iraq.
For a while, al-Libi was practically the poster boy for the success of the Cheney/Bush torture regime; that is, until he publicly recanted and explained that he only told his interrogators what he thought would stop the torture.
You see, despite his cooperation, al-Libi was still shipped to Egypt where he underwent more abuse, according to a declassified CIA cable from early 2004 when al-Libi recanted his earlier statements. The cable reported that al-Libi said Egyptian interrogators wanted information about al-Qaeda’s connections with Iraq, a subject “about which [al-Libi] said he knew nothing and had difficulty even coming up with a story.”
According to the CIA cable, al-Libi said his interrogators did not like his responses and “placed him in a small box” for about 17 hours. After he was let out of the box, al-Libi was given a last chance to “tell the truth.” When his answers still did not satisfy, al-Libi says he “was knocked over with an arm thrust across his chest and fell on his back” and then was “punched for 15 minutes.”
After Al-Libi recanted, the CIA recalled all intelligence reports based on his statements, a fact recorded in a footnote to the report issued by the 9/11 Commission. By then, however, the Bush administration had gotten its way regarding the invasion of Iraq and the disastrous U.S. occupation was well underway.
***
Intensive investigations into these allegations – after the U.S. military had conquered Iraq – failed to turn up any credible evidence to corroborate these allegations. What we do know is that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were bitter enemies, with al-Qaeda considering the secular Hussein an apostate to Islam.
Al-Libi, who ended up in prison in Libya, reportedly committed suicide shortly after he was discovered there by a human rights organization. Thus, the world never got to hear his own account of the torture that he experienced and the story that he presented and then recanted.
Hafed al-Ghwell, a Libyan-American and a prominent critic of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime at the time of al-Libi’s death, explained to Newsweek, “This idea of committing suicide in your prison cell is an old story in Libya.”
Paul Krugman eloquently summarized the truth about the torture used:
Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.
There’s a word for this: it’s evil.
Torture Program Was Part of a Con Job
As discussed above, in order to “justify” the Iraq war, top Bush administration officials pushed and insisted that interrogators use special torture methods aimed at extracting false confessions to attempt to create a false linkage between between Al Qaida and Iraq. And see this and this.
And at 2:40 p.m. on September 11th, in a memorandum of discussions between top administration officials, several lines below the statement “judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [that is, Saddam Hussein] at same time”, is the statement “Hard to get a good case.” In other words, top officials knew that there wasn’t a good case that Hussein was behind 9/11, but they wanted to use the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to justify war with Iraq anyway.
(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.
Therefore, the Bush administration expressly justified the Iraq war to Congress by representing that Iraq planned, authorized, committed, or aided the 9/11 attacks.
Indeed, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind reports that the White House ordered the CIA to forge and backdate a document falsely linking Iraq with Muslim terrorists and 9/11 … and that theCIA complied with those instructions and in fact created the forgery, which was then used to justify war against Iraq. And see this.
Suskind also revealed that “Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official ‘that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.’ ”
Cheney made the false linkage between Iraq and 9/11 on many occasions.
For example, according to Raw Story, Cheney was still alleging a connection between Iraq and the alleged lead 9/11 hijacker in September 2003 – a year after it had been widely debunked. When NBC’s Tim Russert asked him about a poll showing that 69% of Americans believed Saddam Hussein had been involved in 9/11, Cheney replied:
It’s not surprising that people make that connection.
And even after the 9/11 Commission debunked any connection, Cheney said that the evidence is “overwhelming” that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein’s regime , that Cheney “probably” had information unavailable to the Commission, and that the media was not ‘doing their homework’ in reporting such ties.
Again, the Bush administration expressly justified the Iraq war by representing that Iraq planned, authorized, committed, or aided the 9/11 attacks. See this, this, this.
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill – who sat on the National Security Council – also says that Bush planned the Iraq war before 9/11.
Top British officials say that the U.S. discussed Iraq regime change even before Bush took office.
And in 2000, Cheney said a Bush administration might “have to take military action to forcibly remove Saddam from power.” And see this.
The administration’s false claims about Saddam and 9/11 helped convince a large portion of the American public to support the invasion of Iraq. While the focus now may be on false WMD claims, it is important to remember that, at the time, the alleged link between Iraq and 9/11 was at least as important in many people’s mind as a reason to invade Iraq.
So the torture program was really all about “justifying” the ultimate war crime: launching an unnecessary war of aggression based upon false pretenses.
Postscript: It is beyond any real dispute that torture does not work to produce any useful, truthfulintelligence. Today, the following question made it to the front page of Reddit:
Why would the CIA torture if torture “doesn’t work”? Wouldn’t they want the most effective tool to gather intelligence?
The Senate Armed Services Committee report gave the answer.
The “purity” of journalism, and its willingness to act as a “fourth estate” of political influence has fluctuated over the course of American history. In the historic role the press created for itself, as an institution designed to act on the behalf of the people, it is beholden to certain ethical obligations. Viewing journalism as an essential component of a free society requires the existence of reporters who will fairly and truthfully cover events that impact our lives. But today, many would argue that the implied contract between the public and their news media is being infringed upon. In an effort to supply American citizens with compelling, round-the-clock news stories, the pillars of ethical journalism are often brushed aside in favor of expedience. Journalism that proliferates sensationalism and celebrity “news”, while presenting speculation as fact runs rampant.
It has been widely publicized that almost all media in America today comes from just six enormous media conglomerates. With giant corporations dominating the landscape after years of mergers and acquisitions, a dangerous media machine is now in place. Real investigative journalism is disappearing, as editors “push” stories in an unnatural direction to serve a corporate agenda. Editorial integrity is now something that can largely be purchased. Readers, listeners, and viewers of the “news” are left to question if what they’re consuming is even anything close to the truth, often turning to alternative sources for reliable media content. If they’ve been tuning in to Brian Ross, a man who holds the illustrious title of “America’s Wrongest Reporter”, it’s not hard to see why it makes sense to change the channel.
We can trace the evolution of contemporary journalism back to an event that occurred over forty years ago: The Watergate Scandal, and its coverage in the The Washington Post by two scrappy young reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Both saw their role as journalists to be responsible for pursuing stories that service the interests of democracy, using whatever means necessary. As investigative journalists, truth was ultimately at the heart of their mission to remove Nixon from his throne. The pair’s meticulous adherence to journalism’s best practices and protocols – truth, empiricism, verification, impartiality, and clarity – proved their case in a way the public could understand, and their tenacity was rewarded with Nixon’s resignation.
Benjamin Bradlee, the editor of The Washington Post during Watergate, thanked Nixon for giving a boost to journalism in his 1995 memoir. “It is wonderfully ironical [sic] that a man who so disliked – and never understood – the press did so much to further the reputation of the press, and particularly The Washington Post,” he wrote. “In his darkest hour, he gave the press its finest hour.” Woodward and Bernstein, as they scrambled to “follow the money” and covertly meet with Deep Throat source W. Mark Felt, and conduct an impressive inquiry under the nose of government investigators. And they did it while telling the truth the entire time.
The Watergate era, a time not so long ago, precluded today’s bitter partisan politics. As a country we have regressed considerably since; our political system is broken and our media channels are clogged with the same junk that’s obstructing half the nation’s arteries. If the press is designed to provide a public forum for a debate of our current laws and policies, it has some serious cleaning up to do.
But if there are going to be fingers pointed, we can again return to the Watergate Scandal as a turning point in the development of new journalistic practices. The events that took place from 1972-74 opened the door to a new model of journalism – one that, while an admirable coup against Nixon’s regime, also served to plant many of the seeds of distrust we still have against the government, as well as institutionalize the practice of unscrupulous dirt-digging by both reporters and large media entities. When Woodward and Bernstein revealed that Watergate was not just a mere burglary, but an illegal, all-out assault against the legions of people on Nixon’s “enemies list”, Americans were shocked. Their unwavering faith in the White House already shaken by the events in Vietnam, Watergate permanently changed how people – especially young people – looked at their government. At the time, it seemed astonishing that the President of the United States could commit such crimes.
Today, another Watergate-esque scandal seems imminent. Most Americans, if asked, would not say that they trust their government or their politicians to act responsibly. They would also likely add that they do not trust the media to report on any important event in an impartial manner. Since Watergate, mass media has devolved to the point that (returning to Brian Ross, ABC anchor extraordinaire) it not only refuses to do it’s own fact checking or reporting, but demands credit for work in which it had no part. Take for example, when ABC demanded a Pulitzer for work they essentially lifted from Chris Hamby, journalist at the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity. Or even more recently, when many of the nation’s media outlets were crammed with images of Kim Kardashian’s most recent photoshoot. We have come to expect entertainment over significance, shameful reportage that makes E! News look like PBS.
40 years after Watergate, we are still reeling from the effects it had on both modern media and the American political machine. From the events of Watergate to recent exposures of the NSA’s surveillance activities, it’s clear that we need a powerful press to act as a watchdog over the government’s actions. If journalism can save itself, perhaps there’s hope that it can save us too.
The telling sentence in NPR’s report that US attorney general Eric Holder plans to step down once a successor is confirmed came near the end of the story.
“Friends and former colleagues say Holder has made no decisions about his next professional perch,” NPR writes, “but they say it would be no surprise if he returned to the law firm Covington & Burling, where he spent years representing corporate clients.”
A large chunk of Covington & Burling’s corporate clients are mega-banks like JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Bank of America. Lanny Breuer, who ran the criminal division for Holder’s Justice Department, already returned to work there.
In March, Covington highlighted in marketing materials their award from the trade publication American Lawyer as “Litigation Department of the Year,” touting the law firm’s work in getting clients accused of financial fraud off with slap-on-the-wrist fines.
Covington, American Lawyer says, helps clients “get the best deal they can.”
Holder has a mixed legacy: excellent on civil and voting rights, bad on press freedom and transparency.
But if you want to understand what he did for the perpetrators of a cascade of financial fraud that blew up the nation’s economy in 2008, you only have to read that line from his former employer: he helped them “get the best deal they can.”
As for homeowners, they received a raw deal, in the form of little or no compensation for some of the greatest consumer abuses in American history.
Before Holder became Attorney General, banks fueled the housing bubble with predatory and at times, allegedly fraudulent practices.
As far back as 2004, the FBI warned of an “epidemic” of mortgage fraud, which they said would have “as much impact as the Savings & Loan crisis.”
They were wrong; it was worse.
Brian T Moynihan, chief executive officer of Bank of America Corp, one of the banks accused of extensive mortgage abuses. Very little of the money from its settlements has gone to help homeowners.Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images
And banks and lenders carried through that fraud to every level of the mortgage process. They committed origination fraud through faulty appraisals and undisclosed trickery.
They committed servicing fraud through illegal fees and unnecessary foreclosures.
They committed securities fraud by failing to inform investors of the poor underwriting on loans they packaged into securities.
They committed mass document fraud when they failed to follow the steps to create mortgage-backed securities, covering up with fabrications and forgeries to prove the standing to foreclose.
By the time the bubble collapsed, the recession hit and Holder took over the Justice Department, Wall Street was a target-rich environment for any federal prosecutor. Physical evidence to an untold number of crimes was available in court filings and county recording offices.
Financial audits revealed large lapses in underwriting standards as early as 2005. Provisions in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, passed during the last set of financial scandals in 2002, could hold chief executives criminally responsible for misrepresenting their risk management controls to regulators.
Any prosecutor worth his salt could have gone up the chain of command and implicated top banking executives.
In 2009, Congress passed the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act, giving $165m to the Justice Department to staff the investigations necessary to bring those accountable for the financial crisis to justice.
Yet, despite the Justice Department’s claims to the contrary, not one major executive has been sent to jail for their role in the crisis.
The department has put real housewives in jail for mortgage fraud, but not real bankers, saving their firepower for people who manage to defraud banks, not for banks who manage to defraud people.
Most of the “investigations” of financial institutions over the past six years have swiftly moved to cash settlements, often without holding anyone responsible for admitting wrongdoing or providing a detailed description of what they did wrong.
The headline prices of these settlements usually bore no resemblance to the reality of what they cost the banks.
The National Mortgage Settlement, for example, was touted by Holder’s Justice Department as a $25bn deal. In reality, banks were able to pay one-quarter of that penalty with other people’s money, lowering principal balances on loans they didn’t even own.
Other penalties featured similarly inflated numbers that didn’t reflect the true cost. Banks could satisfy their obligations under the settlements through routine business practices (including some, like making loans to low-income homeowners, that make them money).
A recent series of securities fraud settlements with JP Morgan, Bank of America and Citigroup, which DoJ said cost the banks $36.65bn, actually cost them about $11.5bn. And shareholders, not executives, truly bear that cost.
Incidentally, the Wall Street Journal found last week that the Justice Department only collects around 25% of the fines they impose. So the banks may have gotten off even easier.
The Justice Department has reportedly collected only 25% of the fines it has imposed on banks.Photograph: Petros Giannakouris/AP
These settlements have actually perverted the notion of justice, turning accountability into a public relations vehicle. And Holder’s Justice Department has been guilty of cooking the books: they admitted last August to overstating the number of criminal financial fraud charges by over 80%.
The DoJ’s Inspector General criticized this in a March report, and also found that DoJ de-prioritized mortgage fraud, making it the“lowest-ranked criminal threat” from 2009-2011.
As for homeowners, the biggest victims of Wall Street misconduct, they received little relief. Victims who already lost their homes got checks in the National Mortgage Settlement for between $1,500-$2,000, compensating people wrongly foreclosed upon with barely enough money for two month’s rent.
Despite claims that 1m borrowers still in their homes would get principal reductions under the settlement, when the final numbers came in this March, just 83,000 families received such a benefit, an under-delivery of over 90%.
Considering that over five million families experienced foreclosures since the end of the crisis, that relief is a drop in the bucket.
For those still eligible for relief, thanks to the expiration of a law called the Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act, any principal forgiveness will count as earned income for tax purposes, meaning that homeowners struggling to avoid foreclosure will subsequently get hit with a tax bill they cannot afford.
The Justice Department only recognized this belatedly, creating a fund in a recent Bank of America settlement to “partially” defray tax costs.
For others without that benefit, the help the Justice Department provided will look more like harm.
More important, the settlements didn’t end the misconduct.
Homeowners today continue to lose their homes based on false documents. Because the Justice Department just put a band-aid over the fraud, and didn’t convict any of the ringleaders, the problems went unaddressed, and the root causes never got fixed.
In fact, the entire banking sector’s get-out-of-jail free card gives them confidence that they could commit the same crimes again, with little if any legal implications.
The decision to protect banks instead of homeowners should be laid at the feet of the president and his administration, not one man in the Justice Department. But Holder certainly carried out the policy, even if he didn’t devise it.
We’ll soon find out if Holder merely presided over DoJ in a pause between helping corporate clients at Covington & Burling. But the failure to prosecute during his time in office certainly makes it look like Holder’s sympathies were with those clients even while serving as attorney general.
Remember that time the Supreme Court ruled that our DNA is basically just like our fingerprints, and cops can snatch it from us subsequent to arrest? Remember the giant biometrics project the FBI has been spending at least a billion dollars of our money building (with many of the details kept secret), called ‘Next Generation Identification’? With those powers and monies combined, the FBI this week announced its plans “to accelerate the collection of DNA profiles for the government’s massive new biometric identification database.” Like with other biometrics collection schemes, the FBI aims to get local police to do the groundwork.
Various FBI divisions “are collaborating to develop and implement foundational efforts to streamline and automate law enforcement’s DNA collection processes” including at arrest, booking and conviction, according to an Aug. 19 notice about the industry briefing. The ongoing groundwork is expected to facilitate the “integration of Rapid DNA Analysis into the FBI’s Combined DNA Index (CODIS) and Next Generation Identification (NGI) systems from the booking environment.”
CODIS is the government’s central DNA database.
Rapid DNA analysis can be performed by cops in less than two hours, rather than by technicians at a scientific lab over several days. The benefit for law enforcement is that an officer can run a cheek swab on the spot or while an arrestee is in temporary custody. If there is a database match, they can then move to lock up the suspect immediately.
While current law requires DNA sent to CODIS to be examined in an accredited lab, FBI officials are looking for a “legislative tweak” to enable local law enforcement to skip that step, and send arrestees’ DNA straight to the FBI’s national database. In 2011, one out of every 25 Americans was arrested.
EFF’s Jennifer Lynch, one of the nation’s foremost experts on FBI biometrics programs, explains why the bureau’s DNA plans pose a serious threat to civil liberties.
“If you leave something behind, let’s say your trash on the sidewalk out in front of your house, then you’ve abandoned any kind of privacy interest in the trash,” she explained. “And so the cops can search through that trash without a warrant. That reasoning has been extended to DNA — if you leave your DNA behind, then the cops could get it without a warrant and test it.”
“If you consider DNA to be a form of ID, and the Supreme Court has already upheld state laws that allow officers to stop someone and ask for their ID, then this is the logical next step,” she added.
Everyone in the United States knows who gets stopped by police the most: young black and brown people. It’s therefore not hard to imagine whose DNA is going to disproportionately fill up this national database, says Lynch.
“If the cops are stopping more African Americans or Latinos and they have the ability to collect their DNA just at a stop, then it means that the DNA database is going to be even more heavily weighted with DNA from immigrant communities and different ethnic minorities,” Lynch told NextGov.
Concerned about your local police department obtaining a rapid DNA device, or sending your DNA to the FBI just because you were arrested at a protest, or for a bench warrant? Take up the matter at the local level. Tell your city government you don’t want your city or town participating in this dragnet DNA sweep.
There are very few news stories about government overreach that shock me these days, but this week there were two — both in California. Each came and went with barely a whisper in the media, even from the “liberty” news.
Perhaps we’re so bombarded with mafia tactics by the government that some events just get lost in the chaos. And no, one of these developments is NOT the Los Angeles School District acquiring tanks and grenade launchers, although that’s probably of equal significance. Below is the first of these local stories. The second will be in a follow-up article.
This is probably the scariest development in law enforcement, ever, and I don’t say that lightly. If you thought no-knock SWAT raids to serve warrants for non-violent crimes was the epitome of tyranny, wait until you get a load of private mercenaries conducting special forces-type raids on American citizens.
That’s right, a report out of Mendocino, California admits that Blackwater-like private “security” contractors are now being used to “police pot.” Mysterious soldiers repelled out of unmarked helicopters fully armed for war to raid legal medical cannabis gardens last month. They didn’t identify themselves or present paperwork of any kind. They just destroyed the garden and left. Other witnesses claim this invading army is also “confiscating” product.
This is the ultimate “feeler” story in the unfolding Totalitarian Tip-Toe if I’ve ever seen one. A quirky local story of “mystery men” used to raise the public threshold of acceptable tyranny, a.k.a. legitimizing private-sector soldiers for law enforcement.
The war machine seems to be gauging how much terror they can inflict on peaceful Americans before they say WTF (See Ferguson) and, perhaps more importantly, to see if the public will allow this vast new market for war profiteers.
It should be a massive media story “private war profiteering at home to terrorize citizens fight crime”. Helicopters, weapons of war, and tactical gear are expensive. Who’s seeding these start-ups anyway?
The manipulation continued a day after this story was reported, when Alex Altman of TIME wrote “Californians Turn to Private Security to Police Pot Country” as if all the citizens of California have agreed to this type of policing. Subtle manipulation.
Over the summer, residents claimed men in military gear had been dropping onto private property from unmarked helicopters and cutting down the medicinal pot gardens of local residents. Local law enforcement have conducted helicopter raids in the area, but some worried the culprit this time was different: a private-security firm called Lear Asset Management.
The confusion was easy to understand. In the wildlands of California’s pot country, the workings of law enforcement are hard to track, and the rules for growing pot are often contradictory. To add to the mess, the various local, county, state and federal enforcement efforts don’t always communicate with each other about their efforts. The added possibility of private mercenaries, with faceless employers, fast-roping from helicopters raised alarm bells for many farmers.
TIME legitimizes Lear Asset Management and the practice of private policing with a matter-of-fact job description:
They are hired by large land owners to do the work of clearing trespass gardens from private property, and perform forest reclamation, sometimes funded by government grant. Deep in the woods, they cut down illegal pot plants and scrub the environmental footprint produced by the backwoods drug trade. They carry AR-15 rifles, lest they meet armed watchmen bent on defending their plots.
I really don’t have a problem with securing private property from vandals, but did you catch that slip “sometimes funded by government grant”? That’s when “private security” becomes “law enforcement.” This is the RED ALERT buried in this story. At best our tax dollars are being used to fund private armies for large land owners. At worst, when will we see these warriors policing BLM land (aka National Parks)? Wait for it…
Altman quotes official statistics about how successful Lear and law enforcement are in raiding marijuana farmers, measured in the “street value” of the forbidden crop seized at gunpoint, as if that is still acceptable behavior by society’s peace keepers in the era of legal weed. But Altman just uses it as a segue into a broader “problem” of policing environmental vandalism on large stretches of open land, including “public” land.
More recently, the trespass grow sites have migrated from public land onto the vast plots owned by private citizens and timber companies. Some of them have hired Lear to deal with the problem. The company has run about nine missions across California’s pot country this year, with more planned this fall, Trouette says. And while the company’s special-ops aspect gets much of the attention, most of the work focuses on environmental reclamation.
The public is supposed to believe Lear is merely an environmental clean-up team doing community service who just so happens to have military special ops capability. How quaint. I didn’t know litter maintenance required AR-15s. But who would be opposed protecting the environment? Smart marketing.
TIME goes for the hard close to sell this tyranny by providing legal cover for these raids without warrants, before ending the article as a sponsored post for “regulation” of Lear’s “flourishing” domestic mercenary business as the “best thing for locals.”
Reports of vigilante marijuana raids on private property may simply stem from a lack of legal clarity. Under the so-called “open fields doctrine” set forth by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Fourth Amendment does not protect undeveloped property from warrantless searches. As a result, police may be permitted to cut down private gardens without a warrant. (my emphasis because your need to read and reread every word)
In the meantime, Lear has flourished, despite the concern among some local growers. But like most people in the Emerald Triangle, Trouette thinks thebest thing for the locals would be for the feds to sort out all the confusion. “I think the federal government would do everybody a big favor,” he says, “by regulating this industry.” (my emphasis)
So let me get this straight: a criminal gang of armed thugs commits violence and theft, and the best way to solve that problem is to legalize and regulate those thugs? Sounds like ISIS.
The creepiest thing about this development is that it’s a clever, more professional repackaging of a previous attempt to introduce private police in America. Some of you liberty lovers may recall it being rolled out once before in an eerily similar manner.
In 2009, FOX News wroteU.S. Mystery ‘Police’ Force Has Small Montana City on Edge after a local news report aired showing an extremely well-funded private security contractor going by the name American Police Force (APF) rolling into the town of Hardin in black Mercedes tagged as “Harding Police Department”.
Hiring a private firm for domestic policing caused massive outrage not just locally in Montana but also around the United States. APF is now referred to as a well-funded fraud perpetuated by a petty con man and the event was swiftly dumped into the dustbin of history.
American Police Force (APF), and under its revised name American Private Police Force, was a fraudulent entity claiming to be a private military company. It never possessed any legitimacy to operate in the United States. The company’s previous logo was an exact copy of the Serbian state coat of arms which caused some controversy and resulted in the Serbian government threatening legal action against APF if it did not remove or change the logo.
In September 2009, US government contract databases showed no record of the company, while security industry representatives and federal officials said they had never heard of it.
APF was registered as a corporation in California by convicted con man Michael Hilton on 2 March 2009.
Interestingly, there are absolutely no follow-up reports of “Michael Hilton” or anyone else being prosecuted or convicted in the APF case. They simply vanished. Think about that for a moment. A heavily-armed foreign force invades a small town in America on false pretenses committing dangerous fraud and the U.S. government does absolutely nothing about it. What does that tell you?
Well, we know the U.S. military uses private contractors in foreign wars, and we know the Pentagon is arming and militarizing domestic police, and we know the U.S. Army is training to enter law enforcement. It seems to me that it’s all part of the plan to keep the war machine churning and to control the population.
Now with a more polished version of private security, minus the flashy Mercedes and foreign accents, and sold to us as environmental guardians, this story has gone largely unnoticed. Yet, if these raid allegations are true, Lear’s actions already far exceed anything APF did in Montana.
Stay tuned for my next article on the second unreported tyrannical event that happened in California this past week to be released later today or early tomorrow.
When we first learned about NSA metadata collection, we wondered how readily the biggest tech companies acquiesced to the government. Today we start to find out. This is the story of how Yahoo was coerced into PRISM, as told by court documents cited by the Washington Post today.
According to the documents, corroborated by a blog post made public today by Yahoo—the U.S. government first approached the company in 2007 asking for user metadata. The request was unprecedented: The U.S. government was no longer interested in obtaining a court review before requesting metadata on an individual target. The order simply asked for data on targets located outside of the U.S. at the time, be they foreign or U.S. citizens.
Yahoo challenged the government requests several times, citing the limits of the U.S. Constitution, but was denied in the Foreign Intelligence Court of Review, the “secret courts” that oversee surveillance requests regarding national security. The repeated denials, plus the threat of losing $250,000 a day, forced Yahoo to comply with the NSA’s PRISM program.
For its part, the U.S. government used Yahoo as an example to coerce other American tech giants, sharing the rulings against Yahoo with companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple.
This information comes to light today, as roughly 1,500 pages of documents pertaining to Yahoo’s failed legal battle were released by Federal Judge William C. Bryson, who presides over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review. Yahoo requested the unsealing of the documents, and the company’s Ron Bell says in this blog post that Yahoo is working to make these never-before-released documents available on Tumblr.
Now that the courts are unsealing documents surrounding PRISM and other national surveillance programs, it’s possible that we’ll hear about other tech companies and whether they resisted the NSA’s requests for sweeping data dumps. Judging by what we’ve learned today, Yahoo tried to stick up for its users’ privacy—until it couldn’t afford to. [The Washington Post]
The history of prison camps dates way back to the dawn of time, with victorious battles leading to enslavement and eventual death for the defeated. In the middle ages, these practices moved to trades and ransoms. From those ancient times until now, civilizations have battled on how to properly treat prisoners of war, and Gitmo is no different. www.infographicworld.com has created an infographic exploring the history of prisoners of war, along with the present conditions – and the future – of Gitmo.
Gitmo has a sordid history, which was brought prominently into light after the September 11th attacks. Gitmo is a financial hog, costing $454 million in 2013 alone. Since 2002, the naval station has amassed over $5 billion in total costs to the U.S. Since 2002, 779 prisoners have been held at Gitmo, costing $3 million per prisoner per year.
From political lines, to the overall public perception of the prison, this infographic from www.infographicworld.com covers everything you need to know about Gitmo.
Shortly after the Snowden leaks began exposing the NSA’s massive collection efforts, the New York Times uncovered the DEA’s direct access to AT&T telecom switches (via non-government employee “analysts” working for AT&T), from which it and other law enforcement agencies were able to gather phone call and location data.
Unlike the NSA’s bulk records programs (which are limited to holding five years worth of data), the Hemisphere database stretches back to 1987 and advertises instant access to “10 years of records.” And unlike the NSA’s program, there’s not even the slightest bit of oversight. All law enforcement needs to run a search of the Hemisphere database is an administrative subpoena — a piece of paper roughly equivalent to calling up Hemisphere analysts and asking them to run a few numbers. Administrative subpoenas are only subject to the oversight of the agency issuing them.
Unlike the documents obtained by the New York Times (possibly inadvertently), these do contain a few redactions, including some apparent success stories compiled at the end of the presentation. But like the earlier documents, the documents show that the DEA and law enforcement have unchecked access to a database that agents and officers are never allowed to talk about — not even inside a courtroom.
It is expected that all Hemisphere requests will be paralleled with a subpoena for CDRs from the official carrier for evidentiary purposes.
It’s spelled out more explicitly on a later slide, listed under “Official Reporting.”
DO NOT mention Hemisphere in any official reports or court documents.
Judging from the request date, it would appear that this version of the Hemisphere presentation possibly precedes the New York Times’ version. However, this one does not name the cooperating telco, although that appears to be a deliberate choice of the person writing the presentation, rather than due to redaction. At one point the document declares Hemisphere can access records “regardless of carrier,” but later clarifies that it will only gather info that crosses certain telecom switches — most likely AT&T’s. Additional subpoenas will be needed to gather info from other carriers, as well as to obtain subscriber information linked to searched numbers. This small limitation plays right into the DEA’s insistence that Hemisphere be “walled off” from defendants, court systems and the public.
If exigent circumstances make parallel construction difficult, Hemisphere analysts (non-government liaisons within the telco) will “continue to work with the investigator throughout the entire prosecution process in order to ensure the integrity of
Hemisphere and the case at hand.” Analysts are allowed to advise investigators on report writing, presentations to prosecutors and issues occurring during the trial phase. The word “integrity” seems out of place when it describes non-government employees assisting government agencies in hiding the origin of evidence from other government agencies.
Cross-referencing what’s been redacted in this one with the unredacted document published earlier, it appears as though the DEA is trying to (belatedly) hide the fact that its Hemisphere can also search IMSI and IMEI data (for wireless connections). Although this document states (after a long redaction) that Hemisphere does not collect subscriber information, that’s only partially true. As of July 2012, subscriber information for AT&T customers can be obtained from the database. This information may have been redacted or it may be that this presentation pre-dates this added ability.
What this shows is that the DEA has access to loads of information and a policy of “parallel construction in all things.” Tons of other government agencies, including the NSA, FBI and CIA are funneling information to the DEA and instructing it to hide the origin. The DEA then demands law enforcement agencies around the nation to do the same thing. This stacks the deck against defendants, who are “walled off” from the chain of evidence, preventing them from challenging sources, methods or the integrity of the evidence itself.
NSA says it has no idea how much US info it collects, but FBI searches for it so much it can’t count how many times.
The blowback against the National Security Agency has long focused on the unpopular Patriot Act surveillance program that allows the NSA to vacuum up billions of US phone records each year. But after a rush of attention this week, some much deserved focus is back on the surveillance state’s other seemingly limitless program: the warrantless searches made possible by Section 702 of the Fisa Amendments Act, which allows the NSA to do all sorts of spying on Americans and people around the world – all for reasons that, in most cases, have nothing to do with terrorism.
The long awaited draft report from the independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Board (PCLOB) on this subject was finally released Tuesday night, and it gives Americans a fairly detailed look unclassified at how the NSA spies through its notorious Prism program – and how it snoops “upstream” (a euphemism for the agency’s direct access to entire internet streams at telecoms like AT&T). The board issued a scathing report on the Patriot Act surveillance months ago, but oddly they went the opposite route this time around.
While many of the details are interesting, the board’s new report recommends no systematic changes to the several disturbing privacy issues covered therein. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (my former employer) issued a scathing PCLOB review late Tuesday night, calling the report “legally flawed and factually incomplete” and saying it ignored the “essential privacy problem … that the government has access to or is acquiring nearly all communications that travel over the Internet.”
As usual, it’s the Edward Snowden revelations that give context to all the snooping – and provide the impetus to keep pushing for real reform. Some 36 hours before the latest PCLOB report was made public, the Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima and Barton Gellman disclosed previously unreleased Snowden documents showing that true scope of “702”-style information sweeps:
Virtually no foreign government is off-limits for the National Security Agency, which has been authorized to intercept information from individuals ‘concerning’ all but four countries on Earth.
As the Post reports, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s interpretation of the the Fisa Amendments Act is so broad, it “could allow for surveillance of academics, journalists and human-rights researchers.”
Fisa Amendments Act surveillance also includes scanning the emails of Americans never even accused of a crime. It’s the Snowden revelations that originally led the New York Times to report last year any conversation you’ve ever had with someone outside the country may be fair game under the act, as the NSA “is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country who mention information about foreigners under surveillance.”
Perhaps in an attempt to pre-empt the PCLOB report, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper finally just released what he promised Sen Ron Wyden months ago: the number of warrantless searches by the US government on American communications in its vast databases of information collected under the Fisa Amendments Act. This is the second giant problem with 702 surveillance. Wyden refers to these as “backdoor” searches since they’re performed using data supposedly collected for “foreign intelligence” purposes – even though they still suck up huge amounts of purely US information. And it’s exactly the type of search the House overwhelmingly voted to ban in its surprise vote two weeks ago.
The NSA conducted “backdoor” searches 198 times in 2013 (and another 9,500 for internet metadata on Americans). Curiously, the CIA conducts far more warrantless searches of American information in the NSA databases than the NSA itself – almost 10 times more. But the FBI was the worst culprit, querying data on Americans so many times it couldn’t even count. The DNI left it at this: “the FBI believes the number of queries is substantial.”
The FBI has always been the NSA’s silent partner in all its surveillance and has long been suspected of doing the dirty work on Americans’ data after it’s been collected by NSA.
Wyden, who has for years repeatedly pushed for this information to be released to the public, responded:
When the FBI says it conducts a substantial number of searches and it has no idea of what the number is, it shows how flawed this system is and the consequences of inadequate oversight. This huge gap in oversight is a problem now, and will only grow as global communications systems become more interconnected.
The PCLOB also went on to reveal in its report that the FBI can search the vast Prism database for crimes that have nothing to do with terrorism, or even national security. Oh, and how many US persons have had their data collected through Prism and other 702 programs? That government has no idea.
Unfortunately, the PCLOB chickened out of making any real reform proposals, leading Politico’s Josh Gerstein to point out that the Republican-controlled House already endorsed more aggressive reforms than the civil liberties board. More bizarrely, one of the holdouts on the panel for calling for real reform is supposed to be a civil liberties advocate. The Center for Democracy and Technology’s vice president, James Dempsey, had the chance to side with two other, more liberal members on the five-person panel to recommend the FBI get court approval before rummaging through the NSA’s vast databases, but shamefully he didn’t.
Now, as the Senate takes up a weakened House bill along with the House’s strengthened backdoor-proof amendment, it’s time to put focus back on sweeping reform. And while the PCLOB may not have said much in the way of recommendations, now Congress will have to. To help, a coalition of groups (including my current employer, Freedom of the Press Foundation) have graded each and every representative in Washington on the NSA issue. The debate certainly isn’t going away – it’s just a question of whether the public will put enough pressure on Congress to change.
Below is a listing of nicknames and codewords related to US Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and Communications Security (COMSEC). Most of them are from the NSA, some are from other government or military agencies. Some of them also have an abbreviation which is shown in brackets.
NICKNAMES are generally unclassified. NSA uses single word nicknames, outside NSA they usually consist of two separate words, with the first word selected from alphabetical blocks that are assigned to different agencies by the Joint Staff. Usually, nicknames are printed using all capital letters.
CODEWORDS are always classified and always consist of a single word. Active codewords, or their three-letter abbreviations, which identify a classification compartment always need to be shown in the classification or banner line. Normally, codewords are printed using all capital letters.
Due to very strict secrecy, it’s not always clear whether we see a nickname or a codeword, but terms mentioned in public sources like job descriptions are of course unclassified nicknames.
Please keep in mind that a listing like this will always be work in progress (this list has been copied on some other websites and forums, but only this one is being updated frequently!).
BASECOAT – Program targeting the mobile phone network on the Bahamas
BASTE – Retired SIGINT product codeword
– Type 1 Block cipher algorithm, used with many crypto products
BEACHHEAD – Computer exploit delivered by the FERRETCANON system
BEAMER – ?
BELLTOPPER – NSA database
BELLVIEW – SIGINT reporting tool
– List of personnel cleared for access to highly sensitive information or operations
BINOCULAR – Former NSA intelligence dissemination tool
BIRCHWOOD – Upstream collection site
BLACKBOOK – ODNI tool for large-scale semantic data analysis
BLACKFOOT – The French mission at the United Nations in New York
BLACKHEART – Collection through FBI implants
BLACKMAGIC – NSA database or tool
BLACKPEARL – NSA database of survey/case notations(?)
BLACKWATCH – NSA reporting tool
– Program for intercepting phone and internet traffic at switches in the US (since 1978)
BLINDDATE – Hacking tools for WLAN collection, plus GPS
BLUEANCHOR – Partner providing a network access point for the YACHTSHOP program
BLUEFISH (BLFH) – Compartment of the KLONDIKE control system
BLUEZEPHYR – Sub-program of OAKSTAR
BOOTY – Retired SIGINT product codeword
– DNI and DNR metadata visualization tool
BOURBON – Joint NSA and GCHQ program for breaking Soviet encryption codes (1946-?)
BROKENRECORD – NSA tool
BROKENTIGO – Tool for computer network operations
BROADSIDE – Covert listening post in the US embassy in Moscow
BROOMSTICK – ?
BRUNEAU – Operation against the Italian embassy in Washington DC using LIFESAVER techniques
BRUTUS – Tool or program related to MARINA
BUFFALOGREEN – The name ORANGECRUSH was known to Polish partners
BULLDOZER – PCI bus hardware implant on intercepted shipping
– An NSA COI for decryption of network communications
BULLSEYE – NSG High-Frequency Direction-Finding (HF-DF) network (now called CROSSHAIR)
(BYE) – Retired SCI control system for overhead collection systems (1961-2005)
BYZANTINE – First word of nicknames for programs involving defense against Chinese cyber-warfare and US offensive cyber-warfare
BYZANTINE ANCHOR (BA) – A group of Chinese hackers which compromised multiple US government and defense contractor systems since 2003
BYZANTINE CANDOR (BC) – A group of Chinese hackers which compromised a US-based ISP and at least one US government agency
BYZANTINE FOOTHOLD (BF) – A group of Chinese hackers who attacked various international companies and internet services providers
BYZANTINE HADES (BH) – A concerted effort against Chinese hackers who attacked the Pentagon and military contractors. Probably renamed to the LEGION-series
C
CADENCE – NSA database with tasking dictionaries
CAJABLOSSOM – Automated system for analysing and profiling internet browsing histories
CALYPSO – Remote SATCOM collection facility
CANDYGRAM – Laptop mimicking GSM cell tower, sends out SMS whenever registered target enters its area, for tracking and ID of targets
– Class of COMINT spy satellites (1968-1977)
CANOE – Retired SIGINT product codeword
CANNON LIGHT – Counterintelligence database of the US Army
CAPRICORN – (former?) database for voice data
CAPTIVATEDAUDIENCE – Computer implant plug-in to take over a targeted computer’s microphone and record conversations taking place near the device
CARBOY – Second Party satellite intercept station at Bude, England
CARBOY II – Units of ECHELON which break down satellite links into telephone and telegraph channels
CARILLON – NSA high performance computing center, since 1976 made up of IBM 360s and later four IBM 3033s
CASport – NSA user authorization service
– Computer system capable of automatically analyzing the massive quantities of data gathered across the entire intelligence community
CENTER ICE – Data center for the exchange of intelligence regarding Afghanistan among the members of the 14-Eyes/SSEUR
CENTERMASS – NSA tool or database
CERF CALL MOSES1 – Contact Event Record Format – for certain telephony metadata
CHALKFUN – Analytic tool, used to search the FASCIA database
CHASEFALCON – Major program of the Global Access Operations (GAO)
CHEER – Retired SIGINT product codeword
CHESS – Compartment of TALENT KEYHOLE for the U-2 spy plane
CHEWSTICK – NSA tool or database
CHIMNEYPOOL – Framework or specification of GENIE-compliance for hardware/software implants
CHIPPEWA – Some communications network, involving Israel
CHUTE – Retired SIGINT product codeword
CIMBRI – Probably a metadata database
CINEPLEX – NSA tool or database
CLASSIC BULLSEYE – Worldwide ocean SIGINT surveillance system (1960’s-?)
CLEVERDEVICE – Upstream collection site
CLOUD – NSA database
COASTLINE – NSA tool or database
COBALTFALCON – Sub-program of OAKSTAR
COBRA FOCUS – NSA-G operations center for producing intelligence from Iraq
COGNOS – NSA tool or database
CORDOBA – Type 2 Cryptographic algorithm used in a number of crypto chips
COMBAT SENT – Reconaissance operation
COMMONDEER – Computer exploit for looking whether a computer has security software
COMMONVIEW – NSA database or tool
CONFIRM – NSA database for personell access
CONJECTURE – Network compatible with HOWLERMONKEY
CONTRAOCTAVE – NSA telephony tasking database Used to determine ‘foreigness’
CONVEYANCE – Voice content ingest processor
COPILOT – System that automatically scans digital data for things like language, phone and creditcard numbers and attachments
COPSE – Retired SIGINT product codeword
CORALINE – NSA satellite intercept station at Sabena Seca at Puerto Rico (closed)
CORALREEF – Database for VPN crypto attack data
– A series of photographic surveillance satellites (1959-1972)
CO-TRAVELER – Set of tools for finding unknown associates of intelligence targets by tracking movements based upon cell phone locations
COTTONMOUTH (CM) – Computer implant devices used by NSA’s TAO division
COTTONMOUTH-I (CM-I) – USB hardware implant providing wireless bridge into target network and loading of exploit software onto target PCs, formerly DEWSWEEPER
COTTONMOUTH-II (CM-II) – USB hardware host tap provides covert link over USP into target’s network co-located with long haul relay; dual-stacked USB connector, consists of CM-I digital hardware plus long haul relay concealed in chassis; hub with switches is concealed in a dual stacked USB connector and hard-wired to provide intra-chassis link.
COTTONMOUTH-III (CM-III) – Radio Frequency link for commands to software implants and data infiltration/exfiltration, short range inter-chassis link within RJ45 Dual Stacked USB connector
COURIERSKILL – NSA Collection mission system
COWBOY – The DICTIONARY computer used at the Yakima station of ECHELON
CRANKSHAFT – Codename for Osama bin Laden
CREAM – Retired SIGINT product codeword
CREDIBLE – Transport of intelligence materials to partner agencies
CREST – Database that automatically translates foreign language intercepts in English
CRISSCROSS – Database of telecommunications selectors
CROSSBEAM – GSM module mating commercial Motorola cell with WagonBed controller board for collecting voice data content via GPRS (web), circuit-switched data, data over voice, and DTMF to secure facility, implanted cell tower switch
CRUMPET – Covert network with printer, server and desktop nodes
CULTWEAVE – Smaller size SIGINT database
CYBERTRANS – A common interface to a number of underlying machine translation systems
CYCLONE Hx9 – Base station router, network in a box using Typhon interface
D
DAFF – Codeword for products of satellite imagery
DAMEON – Remote SATCOM collection facility
DANCINGOASIS (DGO) – SSO program collecting data from fiber optic cables between Europe and the Far East (since 2011)
DANDERSPRITZ – Software tool that spoofs IP and MAC addresses, intermediate redirector node
DANGERMOUSE – Tactical SIGINT collecting system for like cell phone calls
DARDANUS – Remote SATCOM collection facility
DAREDEVIL – Shooter/implant as part of the QUANTUM system
DARKTHUNDER – SSO Corporate/TAO Shaping program
DARKQUEST – Automated FORNSAT survey system
DAUNT – Retired SIGINT product codeword
DECKPIN – NSA crisis cell activated during emergencies
DEEPDIVE – An XKEYSCORE related method
DEITYBOUNCE – Provides implanted software persistence on Dell PowerEdge RAID servers via motherboard BIOS using Intel’s System Management Mode for periodic execution, installed via ArkStream to reflash the BIOS
DELTA – Former SCI control system for intercepts from Soviet military operations
DENIM – Retired SIGINT product codeword
DESPERADO – NSA software tool to prepare reports
DEWSWEEPER – Technique to tap USB hardware hosts
DIKTER – SIGINT Exchange Designator for Norway
DINAR – Retired compartment for intercepts from foreign embassies in Washington
DIONYSUS – Remote SATCOM collection facility
DIRESCALLOP – Method to circumvent commercial products that prevent malicious software from making changes to a computer system
DISCOROUTE – A tool for targeting passively collected telnet sessions
– NSA database for text messages (SMS)
DISTANTFOCUS – A pod for tactical SIGINT and precision geolocation (since 2005)
DIVERSITY – SIGINT Exchange Designator for ?
DOBIE – The South African consulate and mission at the UN in New York
DOCKETDICTATE – Something related to NSA’s TAO division
DOGCOLLAR – A type of Question-Focussed Dataset based on the Facebook display name cookie
DOGHUT – Upstream collection site
DOUBLEARROW – One of NSA’s voice processing databases?
DRAGGABLEKITTEN – An XKEYSCORE Map/Reduce analytic
DREADNOUGHT – NSA operation focused on Ayatollah Khamenei
– Passive collection of emanations (e.g. from printers or faxes) by using a radio frequency antenna
DROPOUTJEEP – STRAITBIZARRE-based software implant for iPhone, initially close access but later remotely
– System for processing data from mobile communication networks
DRUID – SIGINT Exchange Designator for third party countries
– A US military numeral cipher/authentication system
DRYTORTUGAS – Analytic tool
DYNAMO – SIGINT Exchange Designator for Denmark
E
EAGLE – Upstream collection site
– A SIGINT collection network run by Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States
ECHO – SIGINT Exchange Designator for Australia
ECRU (EU) – Compartment of the ENDSEAL control system
EDEN – Upstream collection site
EGOTISTICALGIRAFFE (EGGI) – NSA program for exploiting the TOR network
EGOTISTICALGOAT (EGGO) – NSA tool for exploiting the TOR network
EIDER – Retired SIGINT product codeword
EINSTEIN – Cell phone network intercepting equipment used by SCS units
– Intrusion detection system for US government network gateways (deployed in 2004)
EINSTEIN 2 – Second version of the EINSTEIN program for detecting malicious network activity
EINSTEIN 3 – Third version of the EINSTEIN program that will monitor government computer traffic on private sector sites too
ELEGANTCHAOS – Large scale FORNSAT data analysis system
EMBRACEFLINT – Tool for computer network operations
ENDSEAL (EL) – SCI control system
ENDUE – A COI for sensitive decrypts of the BULLRUN program
ENTOURAGE – Directional finder for line of bearing for GSM, UMTS, CDMA, FRS signals, works with NEBULA active interrogator within GALAXY program
EPICSHELTER – Sophisticated data backup system designed by Edward Snowden
ERRONEOUSINGENUITY (ERIN) – NSA tool for exploiting the TOR network
EVENINGEASEL – Program for surveillance of phone and text communications from Mexico’s cell phone network
EVILOLIVE – Iinternet geolocation tool
EVOLVED MUTANT BROTH – Second party database
EYESPY – System that scans data for logos of companies, political parties and other organizations, as well for pictures with faces for facial recognition
F
FACELIFT – Codeword related to NSA’s Special Source Operations division
– NSA corporate partner with access to international cables, routers, and switches (since 1985)
FAIRVIEWCOTS – System for processing telephony metadata collected under the FAIRVIEW program
FALLENORACLE – NSA tool or database
FALLOUT – DNI metadata ingest processor/database
– DNR metadata ingest processor/database
FASCINATOR – Series of Type 1 encryption modules for Motorola digital-capable voice radios
FASHIONCLEFT (FC) – Wrapper used to exfiltrate data of VPN and VoIP communications
FASTBAT – Telephony related database?
FASTFOLLOWER – Tool to identify foreign agents who might tail American case officers overseas by correlating cellphone signals
FASTSCOPE – NSA database
FEEDTROUGH – Software implant for unauthorized access to Juniper firewall models N5XT, NS25, NS50, NS200, NS500, ISG1000
FERRETCANON – Subsystem of the FOXACID system
FINKDIFFERENT (FIDI) – Tool used for exploiting TOR networks
FIRE ANT – Open Source visualisation tool
– NSA key generation scheme, used for exchanging EKMS public keys
FIRETRUCK – SIGINT tool or database
FIREWALK -Bidirectional network implant, passive gigabit ethernet traffic collector and active ethernet packet injector within RJ45 Dual Stacked USB connector, digital core used with HOWLERMONKEY, formerly RADON
– NSA program for securing commercial smartphones
FLARE – Retired SIGINT product codeword
FLATLIQUID – TAO operation against the office of the Mexican president
FLEMING – The embassy of Slovakia in Washington DC
FLINTLOCK – The DICTIONARY computer used at the Waihopai station of ECHELON
FLUXBABBITT – Hardware implant for Dell PowerEdge RAID servers using Xeon processors
FOGGYBOTTOM – Computer implant plug-in that records logs of internet browsing histories and collects login details and passwords used to access websites and email accounts
FOREMAN – Tactical SIGINT database? Used to determine ‘foreigness’
FOURSCORE – (former?) database for fax and internet data
FOXACID (FA?) – System of secret internet servers used to attack target computers
FOXSEARCH – Tool for monitoring a QUANTUM target which involves FOXACID servers
FOXTRAIL – NSA tool or database
FRIARTUCK – VPN Events tool or database (CSEC?)
FREEFLOW-compliant – Supported by TURBULENCE architecture
FREEZEPOST – Something related to NSA’s TAO division
FRONTO – Retired SIGINT Exchange Designator for ?
FROSTBURG – Connection Machine 5 (CM-5) supercomputer, used by NSA from 1991-1997
FROTH – Retired SIGINT product codeword
FRUGALSHOT – FOXACID servers for receiving callbacks from computers infected with NSA spying software
G
GALACTICHALO – Remote SATCOM collection facility
GALAXY – Find/fix/finish program of locating signal-emitting devices of targets
GAMMA (G) – Compartment for highly sensitive communication intercepts
GAMUT – NSA collection tasking tool or database
GARLIC – The NSA satellite intercept station at Bad Aibling (Germany)
GATEKEEPER – NSA user account management system
GAVEL – Retired SIGINT product codeword
GECKO II – System consisting of hardware implant MR RF or GSM, UNITEDRAKE software implant, IRONCHEF persistence back door
GEMINI – Remote SATCOM collection facility
GENESIS – Modified GSM handset for covert network surveys, recording of RF spectrum use, and handset geolocation based on software defined radio
GENIE – Overall close-access program, collection by Sigads US-3136 and US-3137
GHOSTMACHINE – NSA’s Special Source Operations cloud analytics platform
GINSU – Provides software persistence for the CNE implant KONGUR having PCI bus hardware implant BULLDOZER on MS desktop PCs
GILGAMESH – Predator-based NSA geolocation system used by JSOC
GISTQEUE (GQ) – NSA software or database
GJALLER – NSA tool or database
GLINT – Retired SIGINT product codeword
GLOBALBROKER – NSA tool or database
GM-PLACE – Database for the BOUNDLESSINFORMANT tool
GODLIKELESION – Modernization program for NSA’s European Technical Center (ETC) in Wiesbaden in 2011
GODSURGE – Runs on FLUXBABBITT circuit board to provide software persistence by exploiting JTAG debugging interface of server processors, requires interdiction and removal of motherboard of JTAG scan chain reconnection
GOPHERSET – Software implant on GMS SIM phase 2+ Toolkit cards that exfiltrates contact list, SMS and call log from handset via SMS to user-defined phone; malware loaded using USB smartcard reader or over-the-air.
GOSSAMER – SIGINT/EW collection and exploitation system
GOTHAM – Processor for external monitor recreating target monitor from red video
GOURMETTROUGH – Configurable implant for Juniper NetScreen firewalls including SSG type, minimal beaconing
GOUT – Subcompartment of GAMMA for intercepts of South Vietnamese government communications
GOVPORT – US government user authentication service
GRAB – SIGINT satellite program
GREY FOX – The 2003 covername of the Mission Support Activity (MSA) of JSOC
GREYSTONE (GST) – CIA’s highly secret rendition and interrogation programs
GROK – Computer implant plug-in used to log keystrokes
GUMFISH – Computer implant plug-in to take over a computer’s webcam and snap photographs
GUPY – Subcompartment of GAMMA for intercepts from Soviet leadership car phones (1960’s-70’s)
H
HALLUXWATER – Software implant as boot ROM upgrade for Huawei Eudemon firewalls, finds patch points in inbound packet processing, used in O2, Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom
HAMMERCHANT – Implant for network routers to intercept and perform exploitation attacks against data sent through a Virtual Private Network (VPN) and/or phone calls via Skype and other VoIP software
HAMMERMILL – Insertion Tool controls HEADWATER boot ROM backdoor
HAMMERSTEIN – Implant for network routers to intercept and perform exploitation attacks against data sent through a Virtual Private Network (VPN) and/or phone calls via Skype and other VoIP software
HAPPYFOOT – Program that intercepts traffic generated by mobile apps that send a smartphone’s location to advertising networks
HARD ASSOCIATION – Second party database
– An IBM supercomputer used by NSA from 1962-1976
HAVE BLUE – Development program of the F-117A Stealth fighter-bomber
HAVE QUICK (HQ) – Frequency-hopping system protecting military UHF radio traffic
HEADWATER – Permanent backdoor in boot ROM for Huawei routers stable to firmware updates, installed over internet, capture and examination of all IP packets passing through host router, controlled by Hammermill Insertion Tool
HEMLOCK – Operation against the Italian embassy in Washington DC using HIGHLANDS techniques
HERCULES – CIA terrorism database
HERETIC – NSA tool or database
HEREYSTITCH – Collaboration program between NSA units T1222 and SSG
HERMOS – Joint venture between the German BND and another country with access for NSA (2012)
HERON – Retired SIGINT product codeword
HIGHCASTLE – Tactical database?
HIGHLANDS – Technique for collection from computer implants
HIGHTIDE – NSA tool or database
HOBGOBLIN – NSA tool or database
HOLLOWPOINT – Software defined radio platform
HOMEBASE – Database which allows analysts to coordinate tasking with DNI mission priorities
HOMEMAKER – Upstream collection site
HOMINGPIGEON – Program to intercept communications from airplane passengers
HOTZONE – ?
HOWLERMONKEY (HM) – Generic radio frequency (RF) transceiver tool used for various applications
HUFF – System like FOXACID?
HYSON – Retired SIGINT product codeword
I
ICEBERG – Major NSA backbone project
ICREACH – Tool that uses telephony metadata
IDITAROD (IDIT) – Compartment of the KLONDIKE control system
INCENSER – A joint NSA-GCHQ high-volume cable tapping operation, part of the WINDSTOP program
INDIA – SIGINT Exchange Designator for New Zealand (retired)
– Satellite intercept station near Khon Khaen, Thailand (1979-ca. 2000)
INTREPID SPEAR – The 2009 covername of the Mission Support Activity (MSA) of JSOC
– Series of ELINT and COMINT spy satellites (since 2009)
IRATEMONK – Hard drive firmware providing software persistence for desktops and laptops via Master Boot Record substitution, for Seagate Maxtor Samsung file systems FAR NRFS EXT3 UFS, payload is implant installer, shown at internet cafe
IRONAVENGER – NSA hacking operation against an ally and an adversary (2010)
IRONCHEF – Provides access persistence back door exploiting BIOS and SMM to communicate with a 2-way RF hardware implant
IRONSAND – Second Party satellite intercept station in New Zealand
ISHTAR – SIGINT Exchange Designator for Japan (retired)
ISLANDTRANSPORT – Internal messaging service, as part of the QUANTUM system
IVORY – Retired SIGINT product codeword
IVY BELLS – NSA, CIA and Navy operation to place wire taps on Soviet underwater communication cables
J
JACKKNIFE – The NSA satellite intercept station at Yakima (US)
JACKPOT – Internal NSA process improvement program (early 1990s – early 2000s)
JETPLOW – Persistent firmware back door for Cisco PIX and ASA firewall and routers, modifies OS at boot time
JOLLYROGER – NSA database
JOSEKI-1 – Classified Suite A algorithm
JOURNEYMAN – Major NSA backbone project
JUGGERNAUT – Ingest system for processing signals from (mobile?) phone networks
– Class of SIGINT reconnaissance satellites (1971-1983)
JUNIORMINT – Implant digital core, either mini printed circuit board or ultra-mini Flip Chip Module, contains ARM9 micro-controller, FPGA Flash SDRAM and DDR2 memories
K
KAMPUS – SIGINT Exchange Designator for ? (retired)
KANDIK (KAND) – Compartment of the KLONDIKE control system
KARMA POLICE – Second party database
KATEEL – The Brazilian embassy in Washington
KEA – Asymmetric-key Type 2 algorithm used in products like Fortezza, Fortezza Plus
KEELSON – Internet metadata processing system
KEYCARD – Database for VPN key exchange IP packet addresses
KEYRUT – SIGINT Exchange Designator for ? (retired)
KILTING – ELINT database
KIMBO – Retired SIGINT product codeword
KLIEGLIGHT (KL) – Tactical SIGINT reports
KLONDIKE (KDK) – Control system for sensitive geospatial intelligence
KLONDIKE – The embassy of Greece in Washington DC
KNIGHTHAWK – Probably a military SIGINT tool
– Method for summarizing very large textual data sets
KONGUR – Software implant restorable by GINSU after OS upgrade or reinstall
KRONE – Retired SIGINT product codeword
L
(LAC) – Retired NSA dissemination control marking
LADYLOVE – The NSA satellite intercept station at Misawa, Japan (since 1982)
LANYARD – Reconaissance satellite program
LARUM – Retired SIGINT product codeword
LEGION AMBER – Chinese hacking operation against a major US software company
LEGION JADE – A group of Chinese hackers
LEGION RUBY – A group of Chinese hackers
LEGION YANKEE – Chinese hacking operation against the Pentagon and defense contractors (2011)
LEMONWOOD – NSA satellite intercept station in Thailand
LEXHOUND – Tool for targeting social networking?
LIBERTY – First word of nicknames for collection and analysis programs used by JSOC and other sensitive DOD activities
LIBERTY BLUE – Modified RC-12 Guardrail surveillance airplane used by JSOC’s Mission Support Activity (MSA)
LIFESAVER – Technique which images the hard drive of computers
LIONSHARE – Internal NSA process improvement program (2003-2008)
LITHIUM – Facility to filter and gather data at a major (foreign?) telecommunications company under the BLARNEY program
LODESTONE – NSA’s CRAY-1 supercomputer
LOGGERHEAD – Device to collect contents of analog cell phone calls (made by Harris Corp.)
LOMA – SCI control system for Foreign Instrumentation and Signature Intelligence
LOPERS – Software application for Public Switched Telephone Networks or some kind of hardware
LOUDAUTO – An ANGRYNEIGHBOR radar retro-reflector, microphone captures room audio by pulse position modulation of square wave
M
MACHINESHOP – ?
MADCAPOCELOT – Sub-program of STORMBREW for collection of internet metadata about Russia and European terrorism
MAESTRO-II – Mini digital core implant, standard TAO implant architecture
MAGIC – Codeword for decrypted high-level diplomatic Nazi messages
– A keystroke logging software developed by the FBI
MAGNES – Remote SATCOM collection facility
MAGNETIC – Technique of sensor collection of magnetic emanations
– Series of SIGINT spy satellites (since 1985)
MAGOTHY – The embassy of the European Union in Washington DC
MAILORDER – Data transfer tool (SFTP-based?)
– Federal database of personal and financial data of suspicious US citizens
– NSA database of bulk phone metadata
MANASSAS – Former NSA counter-encryption program, succeeded by BULLRUN
– NSA database of bulk internet metadata
MARKHAM – NSA data system?
MARTES – NSA software tool to prepare reports
MASTERLINK – NSA tasking source
MASTERSHAKE – NSA tool or database
MATRIX – Some kind of data processing system
MAYTAG – Upstream collection site
MEDLEY – Classified Suite A algorithm
MENTOR – Class of SIGINT spy satellites (since 1995)
MERCED – The Bulgarian embassy in Washington DC
MERCURY – Soviet cipher machine partially exploited by NSA in the 1960’s
MERCURY – Remote SATCOM collection facility
MESSIAH – NSA automated message handling system
METAWAVE – Warehouse of unselected internet metadata
METROTUBE – Analytic tool for VPN data
METTLESOME – NSA Collection mission system
MIDAS – Satellite program
MIDDLEMAN – TAO covert network
MILKBONE – Question-Focused Dataset used for text message collection
– A sister project to Project SHAMROCK (1967-1973)
MINERALIZE – Technique for collection through LAN implants
MIRANDA – Some kind of number related to NSA targets
MIRROR – Interface to the ROADBED system
MOCCASIN – A hardware implant, permanently connected to a USB keyboard
MONKEYCALENDAR – Software implant on GMS SIM cards that exfiltrates user geolocation data
MONKEYROCKET – Sub-program of OAKSTAR for collecting internet metadata and content through a foreign access point
MOONLIGHTPATH (EGL?) – SSO collection facility
MOONPENNY – The NSA satellite intercept station at Harrogate (Great Britain)
MORAY – Compartment for the least sensitive COMINT material, retired in 1999
MORPHEUS – Program of the Global Access Operations (GAO)
MOTHMONSTER – NSA tool for exploiting the TOR network
MOVEONYX – Tool related to CASPORT
MULBERRY – The mission of Japan at the United Nations in New York
(JPM?) – Joint NSA-GCHQ operation to tap the cables linking Google and Yahoo data clouds to the internet Part of WINDSTOP
MUSKET – Retired SIGINT Exchange Designator for ?
MUSKETEER – NSA’s Special Signal Collection unit
– SSO unilateral voice interception program
– Presidential Global Communications System
N
NASHUA – The mission of India at the United Nations in New York
NAVAJO – The mission of Vietnam at the United Nations in New York
NAVARRO – The embassy of Georgia in Washington DC
NEBULA – Base station router similar to CYCLONE Hx9
NECTAR – SIGINT Exchange Designator for ? (retired)
NELEUS – Remote SATCOM collection facility
NEMESIS – SIGINT satellite
– Operation to kill or capture Osama bin Laden (2011)
NIGHTSTAND – 802.11 wireless packet injection tool that runs on standalone x86 laptop running Linux Fedora Core 3 and exploits windows platforms running Internet Explorer, from 8 miles away
NIGHTWATCH – Portable computer in shielded case for recreating target monitor from progressive-scan non-interlaced VAGRANT signals
NINJANIC – Something related to TURMOIL
NITESURF – NSA tool or database
NITRO – Remote SATCOM collection facility
NOCON – NSA dissemination marking or COI
NONBOOK (NK) – Compartment of the ENDSEAL control system
NORMALRUN – NSA tool or database
NUCLEON – Database for contents of phone calls
NYMROD – Automated name recognition system
O
– Umbrella program to filter and gather information at major telecommunications companies (since 2004)
OCEAN – Optical collection system for raster-based computer screens
OCEANARIUM – Database for SIGINT from NSA and intelligence sharing partners around the world
OCEANFRONT – Part of the communications network for ECHELON
OCEAN SHIELD – NATO anti-piracy operation
OCEANSURF – Engineering hub of the Global Access Operations (GAO)
OCELOT – Actual name: MADCAPOCELOT
OCTAVE – NSA tool for telephone network tasking (succeeded by the UTT?)
OCTSKYWARD – Collection of GSM data from flying aircraft
OILSTOCK – A system for analyzing air warning and surveillance data
– CSEC tool for discovering and identifying telephone and computer connections
OLYMPIC – First word of nicknames for programs involving defense against Chinese cyber-warfare and US offensive cyber-warfare
OLYMPIC GAMES – Joint US and Israel operation against the Iranian nuclear program (aka Stuxnet)
OLYMPUS – Software component of VALIDATOR/SOMBERKNAVE used to communicate via wireless LAN 802.11 hardware
OMNIGAT – Field network component
ONEROOF – Main tactical SIGINT database, with raw and unfiltered intercepts
– Newer units of the LACROSSE reconaissance satellites
ORANGEBLOSSOM – Sub-program of OAKSTAR for collection from an international transit switch (sigad: US-3251)
ORANGECRUSH – Sub-program of OAKSTAR for collecting metadata, voice, fax, phone and internet content through a foreign access point
ORION – SIGINT satellite
ORLANDOCARD – NSA operation thtat attracted visits from 77,413 foreign computers and planted spyware on more than 1,000 by using a ‘honeypot’ computer
OSAGE – The embassy of India in Washington DC
OSCAR – SIGINT Exchange Designator for the USA
OSWAYO – The embassy annex of India in Washington DC
– The Lockheed A-12 program (better known as SR-71)
P
PACKAGEDGOODS – Program which tracks the ‘traceroutes’ through which data flows around the Internet
PACKETSCOPE – Internet cable tapping system
PACKETSWING – NSA tool or database
PACKETWRENCH – Computer exploit delivered by the FERRETCANON system
PADSTONE – Type 1 Cryptographic algorithm used in several crypto products
PAINTEDEAGLE – SI-ECI compartment related to the BULLRUN program
PALANTERRA – A family of spatially and analytically enabled Web-based interfaces used by the NGA
PANGRAM (PM) – Alleged SCI control system
PANTHER – The embassy of Vietnam in Washington DC
PARCHDUSK (PD) – Productions Operation of NSA’s TAO division
PARTNERMALL PROGRAM (PMP) – A single collaboration environment, to be succeeded by the Global Collaboration Environment (GCE)
PARTSHOP – ?
PATHFINDER – SIGINT analysis tool (developed by SAIC)
PATHWAY – NSA’s former main computer communications network
– Call chaining analysis tool (developed by i2)
PAWLEYS – SI-ECI compartment related to the BULLRUN program
PEARL – Retired SIGINT product codeword
PEDDLECHEAP – Computer exploit delivered by the FERRETCANON system
PENDLETON – SI-ECI compartment related to the BULLRUN program
PEPPERBOX – Tool or database for targeting Requests (CSEC?)
PERDIDO – The mission of the European Union at the United Nations in New York
PERFECTMOON – An out-sites covering system
PHOTOANGLO – A continuous wave generator and receiver. The bugs on the other end are ANGRYNEIGHBOR class
PIEDMONT – SI-ECI compartment related to the BULLRUN program
PICARESQUE (PIQ) – SI-ECI compartment related to the BULLRUN program
PICASSO – Modified GSM handset that collects user data plus room audio
PINUP – Retired SIGINT product codeword
– Database for recorded signals intercepts/internet content
PITCHFORD – SI-ECI compartment related to the BULLRUN program
PIVOT – Retired SIGINT product codeword
PIXIE – Retired SIGINT product codeword
PLATFORM – Computer system linking the ECHELON intercept sites
PLUS – NSA SIGINT production feedback program
POCOMOKE – The Brazilian Permanent Mission to the UN in New York
POISON NUT – CES VPN attack orchestrator
POLARBREEZE – NSA technique to tap into nearby computers
POPPY – SIGINT satellite program
POPTOP – Collection system for telephony data
POWELL – The Greek mission at the United Nations in New York
PREFER – System for identifying and extracting text messages (SMS) from the DISHFIRE database
PRESSUREPORT – Software interface related to PRESSUREWAVE
PRESSUREWAVE – NSA cloud database for VPN and VoIP content and metadata
PRIMECANE – American high-tech company cooperating in providing a network access point for the ORANGECRUSH program
– Program for collecting foreign internet data from US internet companies
PROFORMA – Intelligence derived from computer-based data
– Mobile tactical SIGINT collection system
PROTEIN – SIGINT Exchange Designator for ?
PROTON – SIGINT database for time-sensitive targets/counterintelligence
PROTOSS – Local computer handling radio frequency signals from implants
PURPLE – Codename for a Japanese diplomatic cryptosystem during WWII
– US military OPSEC program (since 1966)
PUTTY – NSA tool or database
PUZZLECUBE – NSA tool or database
PYLON – SIGINT Exchange Designator for ?
Q
QUADRANT – A crypto implementation code
QUADRESPECTRE PRIME – ?
– A consolidated QUANTUMTHEORY platform to reduce latencies by co-locating passive sensors with local decisioning and traffic injection (under development in 2011)
– Secret servers placed by NSA at key places on the internet backbone; part of the TURMOIL program
QUANTUMBISCUIT – Enhancement of QUANTUMINSERT for targets which are behind large proxies
QUANTUMBOT – Method for taking control of idle IRC bots and botnets)
QUANTUMBOT2 – Combination of Q-BOT and Q-BISCUIT for webbased botnets
QUANTUMCOOKIE – Method to force cookies onto target computers
QUANTUMCOPPER – Method for corrupting file uploads and downloads
QUANTUMDNS – DNS injection/redirection based off of A record queries
QUANTUMHAND – Man-on-the-side technique using a fake Facebook server
QUANTUMINSERT (QI) – Man-on-the-side technique that redirects target internet traffic to a FOXACID server for exploitation
QUANTUMMUSH – Targeted spam exploitation method
QUANTUMNATION – Umbrella for COMMONDEER and VALIDATOR computer exploits
QUANTUMPHANTOM – Hijacks any IP address to use as covert infrastructure
QUANTUMSKY – Malware used to block targets from accessing certain websites through RST packet spoofing
QUANTUMSMACKDOWN – Method for using packet injection to block attacks against DoD computers
QUANTUMSPIN – Exploitation method for instant messaging
QUANTUMSQUEEL – Method for injecting MySQL persistant database connections
QUANTUMSQUIRREL – Using any IP address as a covert infrastructure
QUANTUMTHEORY (QT) – Computer hacking toolbox used by NSA’s TAO division, which dynamically injects packets into target’s network session
QUANTUM LEAP – CIA tool to “find non-obvious linkages, new connections, and new information” from within a dataset
QUARTERPOUNDER – Upstream collection site
– Relay satellite for reconaissance satellites
QUEENSLAND – Upstream collection site
R
RADIOSPRING – ?
RADON – Host tap that can inject Ethernet packets
RAGEMASTER – Part of ANGRYNEIGHBOR radar retro-reflectors, for red video graphics array cable in ferrite bead RFI chokers between video card and monitor, target for RF flooding and collection of VAGRANT video signal
(RGT) – ECI compartment for call and e-mail content collected under FISA authority
RAILHEAD – NCTC database project
RAISIN – NSA database or tool
RAMPART – NSA operational branches that intercept heads of state and their closest aides. Known divisions are RAMPART-A, RAMPART-I and RAMPART-T. Also mentioned as a suite of programs for assuring system functionality
RAVEN – SIGINT satellite
REACTOR – Tool or program related to MARINA?
REBA – Major NSA backbone project
REDHAWK – NSA tool
REDROOF – NSA tool
REMATION – Joint NSA-GCHQ counter-TOR workshop
RENOIR – NSA telephone network visualization tool
REQUETTE – A Taiwanese TECO in New York
RESERVE (RSV) – Control system for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)
RESERVEVISION – Remote monitoring tool
RESOLUTETITAN – Internet cable access program?
RETRO – see RETROSPECTIVE
RETROSPECTIVE – 30-day retrospective retrieval tool for SCALAWAG
RETURNSPRING – High-side server shown in UNITEDRAKE internet cafe monitoring graphic
RHINEHEART – NSA tool or database
– Class of SIGINT spy satellites (in 1975 changed to AQUACADE)
RICHTER – SIGINT Exchange Designator for Germany
RIPCORD – ?
RIVET JOINT – Reconaissance operation
ROADBED – Probably a military SIGINT database
ROCKYKNOB – Optional DSP when using Data Over Voice transmission in CROSSBEAM
RONIN – NSA tool for detecting TOR-node IP-addresses
RORIPA – SIGINT Exchange Designator for ?
ROYALNET – Internet exploitation tool
RUFF – Compartment of TALENT KEYHOLE for IMINT satellites
RUMBUCKET – Analytic tool
RUTLEY – Network of SIGINT satellites launched in 1994 and 1995
S
SABRE – Retired SIGINT product codeword
SALEM – ?
SALVAGERABBIT – Computer implant plug-in that exfiltrates data from removable flash drives that connect to an infected computer
SAMOS – Reconnaissance satellite program
SAPPY – Retired SIGINT product codeword
SARATOGA – SSO access facility (since 2011)
SARDINE – SIGINT Exchange Designator for Sweden
– Narrow band voice encryption for radio and telephone communication
SAVIN – Retired SIGINT product codeword
SCALAWAG – Collection facility under the MYSTIC program
SCALLION – Upstream collection site
SCAPEL – Second Party satellite intercept station in Nairobi, Kenia
SCHOOLMONTANA – Software implant for Juniper J-series routers used to direct traffic between server, desktop computers, corporate network and internet
SCIMITAR – A tool to create contact graphs?
SCISSORS – System used for separating different types of data and protocols
SCORPIOFORE – SIGINT reporting tool
SEABOOT – SIGINT Exchange Designator for ?
SEADIVER – Collection system for telephony data
SEAGULLFARO – High-side server shown in UNITEDRAKE internet cafe monitoring graphic
SEARCHLITE – Tactical SIGINT collecting system for like cell phone calls
SEASONEDMOTH (SMOTH) – Stage0 computer implant which dies after 30 days, deployed by the QUANTUMNATION method
SECONDDATE – Method to influence real-time communications between client and server in order to redirect web-browsers to FOXACID malware servers
SECUREINSIGHT – A software framework to support high-volume analytics
SEMESTER – NSA SIGINT reporting tool
– Transportable suite of ISR equipment (since 1991)
– Radome on top of the U2 to relay SIGINT data to ground stations
SENTINEL – NSA database security filter
SERENADE – SSO corporate partner (foreign?)
SERUM – Bank of servers within ROC managing approvals and ticket system
SETTEE – SIGINT Exchange Designator for ?
– Operation for intercepting telegraphic data going in or out the US (1945-1975)
SHAREDVISION – Mission program at Menwith Hill satellite station
SHARKFIN – Sweeps up all-source communications intelligence at high speed and volumes
SHARPFOCUS (SF2) – Productions Operation of NSA’s TAO division
SHELLTRUMPET – NSA metadata processing program (since December 2007)
SHENANIGANS – Aircraft-based NSA geolocation system used by CIA
SHIFTINGSHADOW – Sub-program of OAKSTAR for collecting telephone metadata and voice content from Afghanistan through a foreign access point
SHILLELAGH – Classified Suite A algorithm
SHORTSHEET – NSA tool for Computer Network Exploitation
SHOTGIANT – NSA operation for hacking and monitoring the Huawei network (since 2009)
SIERRAMONTANA – Software implant for Juniper M-series routers used by enterprises and service providers
SIGINT NAVIGATOR – NSA database
SIGSALY – The first secure voice system from World War II
SILKWORTH – A software program used for the ECHELON system
SILLYBUNNY – Some kind of webbrowser tag which can be used as selector
SILVER – Soviet cipher machine partially exploited by NSA in the 1960’s
SILVERCOMET – SIGINT satellites?
SILVERZEPHYR (SZ) – Sub-program of OAKSTAR for collecting phone and internet metadata and content from Latin and South America through an international transit switch
SIRE – A software program used for the ECHELON system(?)
– Type 2 Block cipher algorithms used in various crypto products
SKOPE – SIGINT analytical toolkit
SKYSCRAPER – Interface to the ROADBED system
SKYWRITER – NSA tool to prepare (internet) intelligence reports
SLICKERVICAR – Used with UNITEDRAKE or STRAITBIZARRE to upload hard drive firmware to implant IRATEMONK
SLINGSHOT – End Product Reports (CSEC?)
SMOKEYSINK – SSO access facility (since 2011?)
SNICK – 2nd Party satellite intercept station in Oman
SNORT – Repository of computer network attack techniques/coding
SOAPOPERA – (former?) database for voice, end product and SRI information
SOMBERKNAVE – Windows XP wireless software implant providing covert internet connectivity, routing TCP traffic via an unused 802.11 network device allowing OLYMPUS or VALIDATOR to call home from air-gapped computer
SORTING HAT – ?
SORTING LEAD – ?
SOUFFLETROUGH – Software implant in BIOS Juniper SSG300 and SSG500 devices, permanent backdoor, modifies ScreenOS at boot, utilizes Intel’s System Management Mode
SOUNDER – Second Party satellite intercept station at Cyprus
SPARKLEPONY – Tool or program related to MARINA
SPARROW II – Airborne wireless network detector running BLINDDATE tools via 802.11
SPECTRE – SCI control system for intelligence on terrorist activities
SPECULATION – Protocol for over-the-air communication between COTTONMOUTH computer implant devices, compatible with HOWLERMONKEY
SPHINX – Counterintelligence database of the Defense Intelligence Agency
SPINNERET (SPN) – SSO collection facility
SPLITGLASS – NSA analytical database
SPLUNK – Tool used for SIGINT Development
SPOKE – Compartment for less sensitive COMINT material, retired in 1999
SPOTBEAM – ?
SPORTCOAST – Upstream collection site
SPRIG – Retired SIGINT product codeword
SPRINGRAY – Some kind of internal notification system
SPYDER – Analytic tool for selected content of text messages from the DISHFIRE database
STARBURST – The initial code word for the STELLARWIND compartment
STARLIGHT – Analyst tool
STARPROC – User lead that can be uses as a selector
STARSEARCH – Target Knowledge tool or database (CSEC?)
STATEROOM – Covert SIGINT collection sites based in US diplomatic facilities
STEELFLAUTA – SSO Corporate/TAO Shaping program
STEELKNIGHT – (foreign?) partner providing a network access point for the SILVERZEPHYR program
STEELWINTER – A supercomputer acquired by the Norwegian military intelligence agency
STELLAR – Second Party satellite intercept station at Geraldton, Australia
STELLARWIND (STLW) – SCI compartment for the President’s Surveillance Program information
STEPHANIE – Covert listening post in the Canadian embassy in Moscow (est. 1972)
STINGRAY – Device for tracking the location of cell phones (made by Harris Corp.) STONEGHOST – DIA network for information exchange with UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (TS/SCI)
STORMBREW – Program for collection from an international transit switches and cables (since 2001)
STRAIGHTBIZARRE – Software implant used to communicate through covert channels
STRATOS – Tool or databse for GPRS Events (CSEC?)
STRAWHAT – NSA datalinks between field sites and processing centers (1969-?)
STRONGMITE – Computer at remote operations center used for long range communications
STRUM – (see abbreviations)
STUCCOMONTANA – Software implant for Juniper T-Series routers used in large fixed-line, mobile, video, and cloud networks, otherwise just like SCHOOLMONTANA
STUMPCURSOR – Foreign computer accessing program of the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations
SUBSTRATUM – Upstream collection site
SUEDE – Retired SIGINT product codeword
SULPHUR – The mission of South Korea at the United Nations in New York
SUNSCREEN – Tool or database
SURFBOARD – NSA tool or database
SURLEYSPAWN – Data RF retro-reflector, gathers keystrokes FSK frequency shift keyed radar retro-reflector, USB or IBM keyboards
SURPLUSHANGAR – High to low diode, part of the QUANTUM system
SURREY – Main NSA requirements database, where tasking instructions are stored and validated, used by the FORNSAT, SSO and TAO divisions
SUTURESAILOR – Printed circuit board digital core used with HOWLERMONKEY
SWAMP – NSA data system?
SWAP – Implanted software persistence by exploiting motherboard BIOS and hard drive Host Protected Area for execution before OS loads, operative on windows linux, freeBSD Solaris
– NSA data model for analyzing target connections
T
TACOSUAVE – ?
TALENT KEYHOLE (TK) – Control system for space-based collection platforms
TALK QUICK – An interim secure voice system created to satisfy urgent requirements imposed by conditions to Southeast Asia. Function was absorbed by AUTOSEVOCOM
TAPERLAY – Covername for Global Numbering Data Base (GNDB), used for looking up the registered location of a mobile device
TARMAC – Improvement program at Menwith Hill satellite station
TAROTCARD – NSA tool or database
TAWDRYYARD – Beacon radio frequency radar retro-reflector used to positionally locate deployed RAGEMASTER units
TEMPEST – Investigations and studies of compromising electronic emanations
– GCHQ program for intercepting internet and telephone traffic
THESPIS – SIGINT Exchange Designator for ?
THINTREAD – NSA program for wiretapping and sophisticated analysis of the resulting data
THUMB – Retired SIGINT product codeword
THUNDERCLOUD – Collaboration program between NSA units T1222 and SSG
TIAMAT – Joint venture between the German BND and another country with access for NSA
TICKETWINDOW – System that makes SSO collection available to 2nd Party partners
TIDALSURGE – Router Configurations tool (CSEC?)
TIDEWAY – Part of the communications network for ECHELON
TIMBERLINE – The NSA satellite intercept station at Sugar Grove (US)
TINMAN – Database related to air warning and surveillance
TITAN POINTE – Upstream collection site
– Presumably Chinese attacks on American computer systems (since 2003)
TITLEHOLDER – NSA tool
TOPAZ – Satellite program
TOTECHASER – Software implant in flash ROM windows CE for Thuraya 2520 satellite/GSM/web/email/MMS/GPS
TOTEGHOSTLY – Modular implant for windows mobile OS based on SB using CP framework, Freeflow-compliant so supported by TURBULENCE architecture
TOWERPOWER – NSA tool or database
TOXICARE – NSA tool
TOYGRIPPE – NSA’s CES database for VPN metadata
TRACFIN – NSA database for financial data like credit card purchases
TRAFFICTHIEF – Part of the TURBULENCE and the PRISM programs
TRAILBLAZER – NSA Program to analyze data carried on communications networks
TRAILMAPPER – NSA tool or database
TRANSX – NSA database
TREACLEBETA – TAO hacking against the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba
TREASUREMAP – NSA internet traffic visualization tool
TRIGGERFISH – Device to collect the content of digital cell phone calls (made by Harris Corp.)
TRINE – Predecessor of the UMBRA compartment for COMINT
TRINITY – Implant digital core concealed in COTTONMOUTH-I, providing ARM9 microcontroller, FPGA Flash and SDRAM memories
TRITON – Tool or database for TOR Nodes (CSEC?)
– Series of ELINT reconnaissance satellites (1994-2008)
TRYST – Covert listening post in the British embassy in Moscow
TUBE – Database for selected internet content?
TUMULT – Part of the TURBULENCE program
TUNINGFORK – Sustained collection linked to SEAGULLFARO, previously NSA database or tool for protocol exploitation
TURBINE – Active SIGINT: centralized automated command/control system for managing a large network of active computer implants for intelligence gathering (since 2010)
TURBOPANDA – The Turbopanda Insertion Tool allows read/write to memory, execute an address or packet; joint NSA/CIA project on Huawei network equipment
TURBULENCE (TU) – Integrate NSA architecture with several layers and sub-programs to detect threats in cyberspace (since 2005)
TURMOIL – Passive SIGINT sensors: high speed collection of foreign target satellite, microwave and cable communications, part of the TURBULENCE program Maybe for selecting common internet encryption technologies to exploit.
TURTLEPOWER -NSA tool
TUSKATTIRE – Ingest system for cleaning and processing DNR (telephony) data
TUTELAGE – Active defense system to monitor network traffic in order to detect malicious code and network attacks, part of the TURBULENCE program
TWEED – Retired SIGINT product codeword
TWISTEDKILT – Writes to Host Protected area on hard drive to implant Swap and its implant installer payload
TWISTEDPATH – NSA tool or database
TYPHON HX – GSM base station router network in box for tactical Sigint geolocating and capturing user
U
ULTRA – Decrypted high-level military Nazi messages, like from the Enigma machine
UMBRA – Retired compartment for the most sensitive COMINT material
UNIFORM – SIGINT Exchange Designator for Canada
UNITEDRAKE – Computer exploit delivered by the FERRETCANON system
USHER – Retired SIGINT product codeword
V
VAGRANT – Radar retro-reflector technique on video cable to reproduce open computer screens
VALIDATOR – Computer exploit delivered by the FERRETCANON system for looking whether a computer has security software, runs as user process on target OS, modified for SCHOOLMONTANA, initiates a call home, passes to SOMBERKNAVE, downloads OLYMPUS and communicates with remote operation center
– Decrypted intercepts of messages from Soviet intelligence agencies
VERDANT (VER) – Alleged SCI control system
VESUVIUS – Prototype quantum computer, situated in NSA’s Utah Data Center
VICTORYDANCE – Joint NSA-CIA operation to map WiFi fingerprints of nearly every major town in Yemen
VIEWPLATE – Processor for external monitor recreating target monitor from red video
VINTAGE HARVEST – Probably a military SIGINT tool
VITALAIR – NSA tool
VOICESAIL – Intelligence database
– Class of SIGINT spy satellites (1978-1989)
VOXGLO – Multiple award contract providing cyber security and enterprise computing, software development, and systems integration support
W
WABASH – The embassy of France in Washington DC
WAGONBED – Hardware GSM controller board implant on CrossBeam or HP Proliant G5 server that communicates over I2C interface
WALBURN – High-speed link encryption, used in various encryption products
WARPDRIVE – Joint venture between the German BND and another country with access for NSA (2013)
WATERWITCH – Hand-held tool for geolocating targeted handsets to last mile
WAVELEGAL – Authorization service that logs data queries
WEALTHYCLUSTER – Program to hunt down tips on terrorists in cyberspace (2002- )
WEASEL – Type 1 Cryptographic algorithm used in SafeXcel-3340
WEBCANDID – NSA tool or database
WESTPORT – The mission of Venezuela at the United Nations in New York
WILLOWVIXEN – Method to deploy malware by sending out spam emails that trick targets into clicking a malicious link
WISTFULTOLL – Plug-in for UNITEDRAKE and STRAITBIZARRE used to harvest target forensics via Windows Management Instrumentation and Registry extractions, can be done through USB thumb drive
WHIPGENIE (WPG) – ECI compartment for details about the STELLARWIND program
WHITEBOX – Program for intercepting the public switched telephone network?
WHITELIST – NSA tool
WHITETAMALE – Operation for collecting e-mails from Mexico’s Public Security Secretariat
WINDCHASER – Tool or program related to MARINA
WINDSORBLUE – Supercomputer program at IBM
WINDSTOP – Joint NSA-GCHQ unilateral high-volume cable tapping program
WINTERLIGHT – A QUANTUM computer hacking program in which Sweden takes part
WIRESHARK – Database with malicious network signatures
WITCH – Retired SIGINT product codeword
WITCHHUNT – ?
WOLFPOINT – SSO corporate partner under the STORMBREW program
WORDGOPHER – Platform to enable demodulation of low-rate communication carriers
WRANGLER – Database or system which focuses on Electronic Intelligence
X
– Program for finding key words in foreign language documents
XKEYSCORE (XKS) – Program for analysing SIGINT traffic
Y
YACHTSHOP – Sub-program of OAKSTAR for collecting internet metadata
YELLOWPIN – Printed circuit board digital core used with HOWLERMONKEY
YELLOWSTONE – NSA analytical database
YUKON – The embassy of Venezuela in Washington DC
Z
ZAP – (former?) database for texts
ZARF – Compartment of TALENT KEYHOLE for ELINT satellites, retired in 1999
ZESTYLEAK – Software implant that allows remote JETPLOW firmware installation, used by NSA’s CES unit
In a somewhat disturbing case of life imitating art, it seems that real world turmoil is catching up with classic science fiction projections of a dystopian future as envisioned by writers like George Orwell and Ray Bradbury — a world where the general populace is under constant surveillance, and the technology that we’ve become overly dependent on has become our greatest liability.
If the recent NSA debacle wasn’t alarming enough for you, Google recently acquired Nest, the smart device firm and home automation pioneer. Home automation, of course, means having multiple devices (kitchen appliances, thermostats, locks and security cameras, etc.) equipped with wireless capability and controllable through an app on a smart device. Your phone, in essence, becomes a remote control for your entire house. Some systems, like the one which Samsung recently premiered at CES 2014, will only enable the company’s own products to interact with one another, and the more glitzy products like the ADT home security systems allow homeowners to control their thermostats and other electronics (regardless of brand) with their smart phone.
If it sounds too good to be true…that’s because it potentially is, as this article from Trend Labs explains. The IP configuration on the devices is simple and the security options are quite limited, leaving them easily penetrable by hackers and thieves. Part of the risk, of course, is that if you have a home security system that can be entirely disabled through a smartphone, a thief could hack into your accounts, deactivate your entire security system with the push of a mere button, and enter your home freely. All of your data becomes more accessible to hackers, and now Google will have even more comprehensive data to sell to third party candidates who can market products even more aggressively to you.
Orwell and Bradbury basically called the whole thing…
One of the great things about science-fiction is that, whatever paranoid projections it makes about future global conditions, it’s always very much a product of its own time.This news raises all sorts of issues for an overly imaginative person.
The situation is like George Orwell’s 1984, where the general public can’t even so much as think in privacy. Everyone is under constant surveillance, and the entire system is under the pretense that this is somehow what’s best for society.
The citizens of Orwell’s fictional Oceania all have “telescreens” in their apartments, which enables Big Brother (whether that’s merely a governmental agency monitoring the public or one chief observer is never entirely clear) to supervise every given moment of everyone’s lives, and to possess an absurd level of intel on every given person under the jurisdiction of their central government. Replace telescreens with tablets, and Big Brother with Facebook and Google, and ask yourself how much of a deviation this setup is from life as we know it today.
It also calls to mind a particularly eerie story penned by Ray Bradbury 1950 entitled August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains. The story focuses on “a-day-in-the-life” of a fully automated home after the extinction of the human race. The house prepares meals, recites important dates and reminders through an intercom system with a pre-recorded voice. We come to learn, throughout the course of the story, that the family who owned the house have been wiped out. We hear about silhouettes permanently fixed unto the side of the homes, in a manner that evoked the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who were vaporized in an atomic blast.
So Bradbury’s grim musings couldn’t have been more fitting for his time, and they are startlingly relevant now. Just as humans channel their ingenuity and creativity into constructive things, or things which enhance life for humanity (all of the advancements in home technology, for instance) the misapplication of that creativity — and the misapplication of technology itself– can have dire, even catastrophic, consequences on humanity.
Is it really as bad as all of that?
Only time will tell, but it does seem more and more likely that whatever minor conveniences the technology yields will hardly justify the potential security risks.
You would hope that, in some cases, paranoid science-fiction literature would help prevent future atrocities from occurring by anticipating them. It’s sort of comforting that we’ve not yet reached the place anticipated by Arthur C. Clarke, where computers have superior intellect to humans and can function, not only with autonomy, but willfully against people. It’s pretty disconcerting, however, that we seem to be drawing nearer and nearer to those imagined realities, not merely a novel thought and fodder for pop literature, but a grim facet of our day to day lives.
Hmm. Hold up. So if we go by this Wikipedia entry..
“Founded as an independent company in 1982, RSA Security, Inc. was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2006 for US$ 2.1 billion and operates as a division within EMC.[5]”
People need to understand, this means RSA took around 2% of what they’d make in one year. FOR A BACK-DOOR OMG. Does this not sound more like a tax, than a payment (never mind a bribe!)? How much would you care about an extra 2% per year? Exactly. Thats all I got. Someone else needs to close that gap. -Max
What’s an encryption backdoor cost? When you’re the NSA, apparently the fee is $10 million.
Intentional flaws created by the National Security Agency in RSA’s encryption tokens werediscovered in September, thanks to documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden. It has now been revealed that RSA was paid $10 million by the NSA to implement those backdoors, according to a new report in Reuters.
Two people familiar with RSA’s BSafe software told Reuters that the company had received the money in exchange for making the NSA’s cryptographic formula as the default for encrypted key generation in BSafe.
“Now we know that RSA was bribed,” said security expert Bruce Schneier, who has been involved in the Snowden document analysis. “I sure as hell wouldn’t trust them. And then they made the statement that they put customer security first,” he said.
RSA, now owned by computer storage firm EMC Corp, has a long history of entanglement with the government. In the 1990s, the company was instrumental in stopping a government plan to include a chip in computers that would’ve allowed the government to spy on people.
The new revelation is important, Schneier said, because it confirms more suspected tactics that the NSA employs.
“You think they only bribed one company in the history of their operations? What’s at play here is that we don’t know who’s involved,” he said.
Other companies that build widely-used encryption apparatus include Symantec, McAfee, and Microsoft. “You have no idea who else was bribed, so you don’t know who else you can trust,” Schneier said.
RSA did not return a request for comment, and did not comment for the Reuters story.
We’re being destroyed from within by a socialistic bureaucracy who’s overriding goal is its own survival at the cost of National Security, which as the historian Thomas Cahill asserts was one of the major reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire.
Hackers Chris Valasek and Charlie Miller have demonstrated from the backseat of a Toyota Prius that all you need is a Macbook and a USB cable in order to hack into a computer-controlled car.
Valasek is the director of security intelligence for IOActive and Miller is a security engineer for Twitter.
These two security researchers showed that they can turn off the breaks, for example, even if the driver is at the helm.
Using a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Miller and Valasek have been researching computerized car vulnerabilities since 2012 and will be displaying their findings at DEF CON, a hacker’s conference in Las Vegas next month.
Miller asserted that they “had full control of braking” and that they “disengaged the brakes so if you were going slow and tried to press the brakes they wouldn’t work. We could turn the headlamps on and off, honk the horn. We had control of many aspects of the automobile.”
• Turn off power to the steering
• Have the onboard GPS give incorrect directions
• Change the numbers on the speedometer
• Force the car to change direction
Miller explained: “At the moment there are people who are in the know, there are nay-sayers who don’t believe it’s important, and there are others saying it’s common knowledge but right now there’s not much data out there. We would love for everyone to start having a discussion about this, and for manufacturers to listen and improve the security of cars.”
Using the vehicle’s electronic control unit (ECU) and the on-board diagnostics port (OBD), Miller and Valasek gained control over a 2010 Ford Escape and Toyota Prius.
ECUs are embedded systems that “controls one or more of the electrical system or subsystems in a motor vehicle.”
The OBD is the “vehicle’s self-diagnostic and reporting” apparatus that “gives the vehicle owner or repair technician access to the status of the various vehicle sub-systems.”
A representative from Toyota explained that the hacker would have to be in the car to manipulate its systems.
He said: “Altered control can only be made when the device is connected. After it is disconnected the car functions normally. We don’t consider that to be ‘hacking’ in the sense of creating unexpected behavior, because the device must be connected – ie the control system of the car physically altered. The presence of a laptop or other device connected to the OBD [on board diagnostics] II port would be apparent.”
Hacking into cars that are remotely controlled, such as Google’s self-driving vehicles, is a concern and this researcher could uncover implications for security purposes.
In 2010, teams from the University of Washington (UW) and the University of California (UC) were able to breach the computer systems of cars using cellular phone connections, Bluetooth headsets and a CD.
Stefan Savage from UC explained that their research “explores how hard it is to compromise a car’s computers without having any direct physical access to the car.”
Computerized cars “contain cellular connections and Bluetooth wireless technology” that could be tapped into remotely and used to take over the controls of the vehicle, listen into the conversations taking place in the cab of the car and completely compromise the safety of the vehicle.
Because computer connections to cars are virtually indistinguishable from internet-connected computers, their propensity toward vulnerabilities from outside influences are similar.
Using an On-Star navigation unit, a hacker could utilize the controls a remote technician at the GPS corporation’s on-call center because they are fully capable of controlling a vehicle in the event of an accident or call from a customer.
With complete disregard for driver privacy, the Obama administration gave their consent to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to mandate black box event data recorders (EDR) be installed in all new cars in the US.
The NHTSA says that by September 2014 all car and light trucks will be equipped with EDRs that will silently “record the actions of drivers and the responses of their vehicles in a continuous information loop.”
The information recorded by EDRs includes:
• vehicle speed
• whether the brake was activated in the moments before a crash
• crash forces at the moment of impact
• information about the state of the engine throttle
• air bag deployment timing and air bag readiness prior to the crash
• whether the vehicle occupant’s seat belt was buckled
The NHTSA claims that “EDRs do not collect any personal identifying information or record conversations and do not run continuously.”
Advanced EDRs can collect detailed information about drivers and their driving habits; including the size and weight of the driver, the seat position, the habits of the driver as well as passengers.
The excuse is the EDRs gather information about car crashes in the moments leading up to the accident that manufacturers can use to improve their safety measures when constructing vehicles. However, the government regulation utilizes surveillance technology with policies that do not outline the expressed use of the data collected in the EDRs.
No one said it better than Michael Crichton – who, in addition to being a best selling author, was also a physician.
During a lecture at Cal Tech, he said, “Let’s be clear: The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right. … The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.”
The medical community has always been subject to “group-think,” but in recent decades we have become the leaders. Numerous physician-scientists have been ostracized, defrocked, de-licensed and in some cases driven to self-destruction by a medical community that has embraced consensus in science.
In essence, “We don’t care about your data; we all agree you are wrong.”
I once had a paper rejected from a major spine journal with a one line denouement: “Everyone knows you can’t do that.”
With time, ultimately, truth prevails, and renegade but correct physicians are vindicated – but not in time to save those patients who die from the mistaken consensus. Today, this “group-think” is depriving people from some of the best and cheapest medical treatment available – supplementation with adequate Vitamin D3.
Vitamin D deficiency has been associated with childhood rickets – a bone disorder – for over a hundred years. And it has been known since the 1970s that those living on the equator, regardless of particular locale, have lower rates of multiple sclerosis, colon cancer and depression. But more recently, many astute observers have discovered that low Vitamin D leads to many other disorders, including cardiac arrhythmia, breast cancer, adult fractures, dementia, heart attack risk and even diabetes.
Most recently, studies have demonstrated that higher levels of Vitamin D improve longevity and are beneficial at preventing influenza – even better than vaccination. Studies showing beneficial effects of high vitamin D levels are quite convincing. They not only show a correlation between low Vitamin D blood levels and the problem, but show improvement in the disease or prevention of the condition when levels are raised up through supplementation.
As an example, it has been shown in the laboratory that heart muscle does not contract well unless adequate Vitamin D is present. An Italian population study showed that low Vitamin D was proportional to atherosclerotic plaques (clogging of the arteries). Furthermore, a Japanese study of dialysis patients demonstrated that correcting Vitamin D deficiency significantly lowered death from heart attacks and heart disease in general.
These are only a few of the rapidly expanding body of literature supporting the role of Vitamin D in multiple disease prevention. But to achieve the positive effects seen in many diseases, blood levels need to be in the range of 50 to 100 ng/dl, not the 20 ng/dl that laboratories report as the lowest range of “normal” (how labs determine “normal” is the subject of another column). Specifically in the case of breast cancer, if one achieves blood levels above 55 ng/dl, the risk of breast cancer is diminished 85 percent.
It is the observation of many, many practicing clinicians that 1) most patients test in the low 20s, and 2) 400 iu of Vitamin D a day – the government recommended daily allowance doesn’t raise the levels at all. Studies of equatorial inhabitants demonstrate that some of the longest-lived people on the planet obtain 30,000-40,000 iu of Vitamin D (specifically D3) a day from the sunlight – nature’s source of the vitamin. Given that, it is not suprising that supplementing 10,000 iu a day of Vitamin D3 has been shown to have no adverse effects.
As an Orthopaedic Surgeon, I deal with bone disorders daily, and have long been interested in this topic. I quit testing for Vitamin D levels in untreated people after every one of my patients tested in the low 20s. I only tested my husband because he was convinced that golfing in Arizona 18 holes, six days a week would raise his level. It did not – his level was 22 ng/dl.
As a final fact, D3 supplementation is cheap. For less than $12 a month you can easily take 10,000 iu of Vitamin D3 a day.
Now, given all this, what would you do?
I, for one take 10,000 units of Vitamin D3 a day. I have done so for over 7 years, and my levels of 55 ng/dl are barely in the optimal range of 50-100ng/dl. I recommend the same to all my patients. But I must warn them that the government, via the Institute of Medicine and the FDA, disagree and believe people should take only 600-800 iu a day.
Now it doesn’t take a medical degree to figure out that a cheap treatment that has such potential upside with so little (if any) downside is worth doing as real preventive medicine. But the government consensus – developed by intellectuals who feel they are infinitely smarter than we are, and should be able to make our choices for us – is that there is no evidence for the beneficial claims.
Really? If they emerge from their collective basement, they will find pages and pages of references. Don’t believe it? Do a simple Google search. Or just read the newspaper. Besides frequent articles in medical and general science journals supporting Vitamin D3 supplementation, there are monthly news stories about this rapidly advancing science.
Sadly, the government doesn’t just want to discourage you from taking extra Vitamin D, they want to prohibit it. Senator Dick Durban, D-Ill., in 2011 introduced a bill (innocuously labeled the “Supplement Labeling Act”) which would so over-regulate the supplement industry that they could no longer supply products such as Vitamin D3 at a cost affordable to the average consumer.
And state medical boards, which are now populated by many non-physicians, sanction physicians who step out of this approved “consensus” – what they call “standard of care.” According to them, if you are not doing what 90 percent of your colleagues are doing, you are by definition wrong. And they can punish you, even to the extent of taking away your license. So, regardless of progress in science, if 90 percent of doctors are recommending an inadequate dose of Vitamin D, your doctor must give you this wrong advice.
To be a scientific leader in this new world order is to be wrong. If the phone company had this philosophy, we would still be tied to land line rotary dials.
Science and medicine are not a vote. As Dr. Crichton pointed out, voting is for politicians. Science requires freedom to consider the alternatives, and in medicine, the freedom to make our own choices – not have government bureaucrats or the Institute of Medicine make them for us
Many documents produced by the U.S. government are confidential and not released to the public for legitimate reasons of national security. Others, however, are kept secret for more questionable reasons. The fact that presidents and other government officials have the power to deem materials classified provides them with an opportunity to use national security as an excuse to suppress documents and reports that would reveal embarrassing or illegal activities.
I’ve been collecting the stories of unreleased documents for several years. Now I have chosen 11 examples that were created—and buried—by both Democratic and Republican administrations and which cover assassinations, spying, torture, 50-year-old historical events, presidential directives with classified titles and…trade negotiations.
1. Obama Memo Allowing the Assassination of U.S. Citizens
When the administration of George W. Bush was confronted with cases of Americans fighting against their own country, it responded in a variety of ways. John Walker Lindh, captured while fighting with the Taliban in December 2001, was indicted by a federal grand jury and sentenced to 20 years in prison. José Padilla was arrested in Chicago in May 2002 and held as an “enemy combatant” until 2006 when he was transferred to civilian authority and, in August 2007, sentenced to 17 years in prison for conspiring to support terrorism. Adam Gadahn, who has made propaganda videos for al-Qaeda, was indicted for treason in 2006 and remains at large.
After he took over the presidency, Barack Obama did away with such traditional legal niceties and decided to just kill some Americans who would previously have been accused of treason or terrorism. His victims have included three American citizens killed in Yemen in 2011 by missiles fired from drones: U.S.-born anti-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, Samir Khan, an al-Qaeda propagandist from North Carolina, and Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki.
Obama justified his breach of U.S. and international law with a 50-page memorandum prepared by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. Attorney General Eric Holder argued that the killing of Awlaki was legal because he was a wartime enemy and he could not be captured, but the legal justification for this argument is impossible to confirm because the Obama administration has refused to release the memo.
2. The Obama Interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act
Section 215 of the Patriot Act allows the FBI, in pursuit of spies and terrorists, to order any person or entity to turn over “any tangible things” without having to justify its demands by demonstrating probable cause. For example, a library can be forced to reveal who borrowed a book or visited a web site. According to Section 215, the library is prohibited from telling anyone what it has turned over to the FBI.
The Obama administration has created a secret interpretation of Section 215 that goes beyond the direct wording of the law to include other information that can be collected. Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, who, as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was briefed about this secret interpretation, urged the president to make it public. “I want to deliver a warning this afternoon,” he said. “When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry.”
Wyden and Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado, also a Democrat, have implied that the Obama administration has expanded the use of Section 215 to activities other than espionage and terrorism. In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Wyden and Udall wrote that “there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn’t know what its government thinks the law says.” 3. 30-page Summary of 9/11 Commission Interview with Bush and Cheney
You would have thought that, in the interests of the nation, the Bush administration would have demanded a thorough investigation of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the deadliest assault ever on U.S. soil. Instead, they fought tooth and nail against an independent investigation. Public pressure finally forced President George W. Bush to appoint a bipartisan commission that came to be known as the 9/11 Commission. It was eventually given a budget of $15 million…compared to the $39 million spent on the Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton investigation. When the commission completed its work in August 2004, the commissioners turned over all their records to the National Archives with the stipulation that the material was to be released to the public starting on January 2, 2009. However, most of the material remains classified. Among the more tantalizing still-secret documents are daily briefings given to President Bush that reportedly described increasingly worried warnings of a possible attack by operatives of Osama bin Laden.
Another secret document that the American people deserve to see is the 30-page summary of the interview of President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney conducted by all ten commissioners on April 29, 2004. Bush and Cheney refused to be interviewed unless they were together. They would not testify under oath and they refused to allow the interview to be recorded or transcribed. Instead the commission was allowed to bring with them a note taker. It is the summary based on this person’s notes that remains sealed.
4. Memos from President George W. Bush to the CIA Authorizing Waterboarding and other Torture Techniques
Four days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush signed a “memorandum of notification” (still secret) that authorized the CIA to do what it needed to fight al-Qaeda. However the memo did not address what interrogation and torture techniques could be used on captured suspects. By June 2003, Director George Tenet and others at the CIA were becoming worried that if their seemingly illegal tactics became known to the public, the White House would deny responsibility and hang the CIA out to dry. After much discussion, Bush’s executive office handed over two memos, one in 2003 and another in 2004, confirming White House approval of the CIA interrogation methods, thus giving the CIA “top cover.” It is not known if President Bush himself signed the memos.
5. 1,171 CIA Documents Related to the Assassination of President Kennedy
It’s been 49 years since President John F. Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas, yet the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) insists that more than one thousand documents relating to the case should not be released to the public until NARA is legally required to do so in 2017…unless the president at that time decides to extend the ban. It would appear that some of the blocked material deals with the late CIA agent David Phillips, who is thought to have dealt with Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City six weeks before the assassination.
6. Volume 5 of the CIA’s History of the Bay of Pigs Fiasco
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, CIA historian Dr. Jack B. Pfeiffer compiled a multi-volume history of the failed US attempt to invade Cuba in April 1961. In August 2005, the National Security Archive at George Washington University, citing the Freedom of Information Act, requested access to this history. The CIA finally released the information almost six years later, in July 2011. However it refused to release Volume V, which is titled “CIA’s Internal Investigation of the Bay of Pigs Operations.” Although more than 50 years have passed since the invasion, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Volume V is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act because it “is covered by the deliberative process privilege” which “covers documents reflecting advisory opinions, recommendations and deliberations comprising part of a process by which governmental decisions and policies are formulated.”
7. National Security Decision Directives with Classified Titles
The day before he left the White House on January 20, 1993, President George H. W. Bush issued National Security Directive (NSD) #79, a document so secret that even its title remains classified almost 20 years later. The same goes for National Security Directive #77, issued a few days earlier, as well as four others issued in 1989 (#11, 13a, 19a and 25a). If the “a”s are any indication of the subjects, it is worth noting that NSD 13 dealt with countering cocaine trafficking in Peru; NSD 19 dealt with Libya and NSD 25 with an election in Nicaragua.
President Ronald Reagan also issued six NSDs with classified titles, and President Bill Clinton issued 29. President George W. Bush issued two such NSDs, presumably shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. President Barack Obama has issued at least seven Presidential Policy Directives with classified titles.
8. Major General Douglas Stone’s 700-Page Report on Prisoners Held in Afghanistan
Marine Corps General Douglas Stone earned positive reviews for his revamping of detention operations in Iraq, where he determined that most of the prisoners held by the United States were not actually militants and could be taught trades and rehabilitated. Based on his success in Iraq, Stone was given the task of making an evaluation of detainee facilities in Afghanistan. His findings, conclusions and recommendations were included in a 700-page report that he submitted to the U.S. Central Command in August 2009. According to some accounts of the report, Stone determined that two-thirds of the Afghan prisoners were not a threat and should be released. However, three years after he completed it, Stone’s report remains classified.
9. Detainee Assessment Briefs for Abdullah Tabarak and Abdurahman Khadr
In 2011, WikiLeaks released U.S. military files known as Detainee Assessment Briefs (DABs), which describe the cases of 765 prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay. However, there were actually 779 prisoners. So what happened to the files for the other fourteen? Andy Worthington, author of The Guantanamo Files, has noted that two of the fourteen missing stories are especially suspicious: those of Abdullah Tabarak and Abdurahman Khadr.
Tabarak, a Moroccan, was allegedly one of Osama bin Laden’s long-time bodyguards, and took over bin Laden’s satellite phone in order to draw U.S. fire to himself instead of to bin Laden when U.S. forces were chasing the al-Qaeda leader in the Tora Bora mountains in December 2001. Captured and sent to Guantánamo, Tabarak was mysteriously released, sent back to Morocco in July 2003, and set free shortly thereafter.
Abdurahman Khadr, the self-described “black sheep” of a militant family from Canada, was 20 years old when he was captured in Afghanistan and turned over to American forces. He has said that he was recruited by the CIA to become an informant at Guantánamo and then in Bosnia. When the CIA tried to send him to Iraq, he refused and returned to Canada. His younger brother, Omar, was 15 years old when he was captured in Afghanistan and accused of killing an American soldier, Sergeant First Class Christopher Speer, during a firefight. He was incarcerated at Guantánamo for almost ten years until he was finally released to Canadian custody on September 29, 2012.
10. FBI Guidelines for Using GPS Devices to Track Suspects
On January 23, 2012, in the case of United States v. Jones, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that attaching a GPS device to a car to track its movements constitutes a “search” and is thus covered by the Fourth Amendment protecting Americans against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” But it did not address the question of whether the FBI and other law enforcement agencies must obtain a warrant to attach a GPS device or whether it is enough for an agent to believe that such a search would turn up evidence of wrongdoing.
A month later, at a symposium at the University of San Francisco, FBI lawyer Andrew Weissman announced that the FBI was issuing two memoranda to its agents to clarify how the agency would interpret the Supreme Court decision. One memo dealt with the use of GPS devices, including whether they could be attached to boats and airplanes and used at international borders. The second addressed how the ruling applied to non-GPS techniques used by the FBI.
The ACLU, citing the Freedom of Information Act, has requested publication of the two memos because they “will shape not only the conduct of its own agents but also the policies, practices and procedures of other law enforcement agencies—and, consequently, the privacy rights of Americans.”
11. U.S. Paper on Negotiating Position on the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas
The subject of international trade negotiations is one that makes most people’s eyes glaze over. So why is the Obama administration fighting so hard to keep secret a one-page document that relates to early negotiations regarding the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA), an accord that was proposed 18 years ago and about which public negotiations ended in 2005? All we know is that the document “sets forth the United States’ initial proposed position on the meaning of the phrase ‘in like circumstances.’” This phrase “helps clarify when a country must treat foreign investors as favorably as local or other foreign investors.”
Responding to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by The Center for International Environmental Law, DC District Judge Richard W. Roberts ordered the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) to release the document, but the Obama administration has refused, claiming that disclosure “reasonably could be expected to result in damage to the national security” because all the nations involved in the failed negotiations agreed to keep all documents secret until December 31, 2013…“unless a country were to object to the release of one of its own documents at that time.” Judge Roberts ruled that the USTR has failed to present any evidence that release of the document would damage national security.
Most likely, the Obama administration is afraid that release of the document would set a precedent that could impede another secret trade negotiation, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), also known as the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement, which seeks to establish a free trade zone among the U.S., New Zealand, Chile, Singapore, Brunei, Australia, Peru, Vietnam, Malaysia and possibly Canada, Mexico and Japan.
The NDAA should scare the hell out of every American Citizen. This allows the government the authority to secretly arrest Americans, without due process, torture and even murder American citizens without so much as a trial. The National Defense Resources Preparedness allows the president, without going through the U.S. Congress, the ability to seize control of all corporate assets, manufacturing operations, and conscript American civilians into work brigades (i.e. slave labor), seize all food, impose restrictions and rations on all vital resources and to hand these resources to the Department of Homeland Security. Section 201 of this Executive Order allows the president to seize control of all corporate infrastructure, manufacturing operations, control of food, control of farm equipment, control of fuel, control electricity, control of water resources, and control of all civilian transportation.
It is also been documented, ad nauseam, that the existence and operational activation of FEMA camps is now a provable fact as reported by CBS News. Let’s not kid ourselves, FEMA camps are the future concentration camps.
There are many other examples of impending government tyranny that could easily be pointed out here. However, the abovementioned governmental policies are all the proof that America needs to come to the realization that we are all in a great deal of danger and that you, the American middle class, are going to be the targets of this tyrannical oppression.
If elements of your government were not planning to commit genocide against the American people, then why would these policies be enacted? Should we just think that the government doesn’t really mean it when they say they can secretly arrest and murder Americans without following the due process of law under the NDAA? Should we think is just a silly conspiracy theory when we state that Obama has given himself the authority to seize every meaningful asset in this country based solely on his own personal say-so? Is America so dumbed-down to not be able recognize the danger when it’s staring us in the face, The danger is in print, click on the hypertext links and read for yourself that the elite are telling you what they are planning to do to you.
I find it laughable how the country has been conditioned to laugh at any kind of the conspiracy theory, as if two evil man would never get together and conspire to do anything. The refusal of Americans to recognize these dangers, and dismiss them as merely wild-eyed conspiracy theories, speaks to how dumbed down our people have become due to a substandard education system and through the controlled corporate media in which only five corporations own over 95% of the entire media industrial complex.
The Trigger Event
Every act of civil disobedience, every act of revolution and every act of tyrannical genocide committed by government, requires a trigger event. For the Nazis, this trigger event included burning down the Reichstag building and blaming the Communists as an excuse to declare martial law. What will be the trigger event for the coming genocidal holocaust committed against American citizens? No one can say for sure. However, history has proven that government gun confiscation from private citizens are the chest pains prior to the heart attack. In the 20th century, there were 17 major genocides committed against civilian populations resulting in a death toll of around 60 millionpeople. Everyone of these genocides was preceded by gun confiscation which rendered the intended victims defenseless against the slaughter that awaited them.
It is widely known, that Obama is feverishly attempting to usher in the UN Gun Ban Treaty. If he is unable to ram it through Congress, as he is tried before, he is very likely codify gun control through executive order. When gun confiscation comes, it’s time for people like you and I to run for the hills because if you are caught and sent to a FEMA “re-education” camp, you are probably not coming out alive.
Control of communications is also a necessary prerequisite to carry out tyranny against a civilian population. We know that the globalists corporations control 95% of the establishment media. So, that goal has already been accomplished. However the one medium of communication exchange not under the control of the New World Order, is the Internet. In the same proximity of time that we will see gun control introduced into American society on a widespread basis, one can expect the Internet to be taken down and tightly censored as it is in China. The New American Magazine has reported that Obama has given the codes to the DNS servers, for the Internet, to the United Nations. If this is correct, we are not going to have to wait long for this insanity to unfold. And of course, should all else fail, I don’t doubt for a second that this administration will not hesitate to roll out a false flag attack as a prelude to the declaration of martial law and seize American guns under this pretext.
Are You Ready?
Are you ready for the coming tyrannical crackdown and the complete evisceration of our constitutional liberties? Have you taken the proper precautions that will ensure the safety of you and your family? It is not likely that very many of us have taken the any meaningful steps to maximize our chances for survival in what will prove to be humanity’s darkest days. Do you have what it takes to survive in a FEMA camp?
When the FEMA bus rolls into your neighborhood, are you prepared to deal with what lies ahead? Let’s assume for a second that martial law is declared and you were not able to find a safe sanctuary and that you are arrested by the powers that be. Your family will subsequently be separated by the authorities as a prelude to sending you to a FEMA camp, and that means that men will go to one facility, and women will go to another. Children will have their own facility awaiting them. In all likelihood, this will mark the last time you will ever see your family. How do I know this? Read the Rex 84 documents.
Imagine how a man who is deprived of everyone he has ever cared about, and at the same time this man has lost his house and all of his possessions, how will he survive? There are two primary dangers facing detainees. The first is bad luck. The second danger is the loss of hope. Victor Frankl, the renowned psychiatrist, who spent four years in Auschwitz, thought that the loss of hope was the number one factor associated with prisoner mortality in a concentration camp detention situation. How will you find meaning in your life when you’re separated from everything you’ve ever known and loved?
In the previous days as a history instructor, I used to have survivors of the Holocaust come and speak to my students. Subsequently, I asked all of these former death camp prisoners, what was the number one factor in their survival? Almost to a person, they stated the number one factor in their survival was luck. I was told that the Nazis would herd people to the showers which they knew was a death trap, and they were the next in line, but were turned away, because the quota had been met. It just wasn’t their day to die.
If you are sent to a FEMA camp, there are things you can do to exercise control over the things of which you have influence. The Jews were a very resilient people and were able to manufacture their own subculture. There were those, however, they did resist as they ran from the relocation trains, and/or attacked their captors. In almost every instance, resisting authorities at the time of arrest was almost 100% fatal.
For those who arrived at the death camps, a vibrant subculture appeared as the people played cards and actors, musicians, comics, singers, and dancers all entertained small groups who came together for a few hours to forget their daily terror and despair. Singers and poets also perform their craft as well. And of course, people continue to pray even though it was against the rules. People formed bonds with each other, developed a level of affection and respect. In short, they replaced the loss of primary family associations with people facing imminent death every day. The lesson is clear, if you’re ever forced into a FEMA camp, pray for good luck and foster relationships among your fellow detainees and find pleasure in the small things over which you will have some measure of control.
Organized Resistance Within the Camp
What about organizing a resistance in the FEMA camps, would that work? The history lesson which can be derived, from this question, is not promising.In Treblinka, seven hundred Jews were successful in blowing up the camp on August 2, 1943. All but 150 of the inmates perished in retaliation for their efforts. Only 12 Treblinka inmates survived the war. In Sobibor, Jewish and Russian inmates mounted an escape on October 14, 1943. One in ten successfully successfully escaped, about 60 out of 600. The prisoners involved in the escape survived to join the Soviet underground. In Auschwitz, on October 7, 1944, one of the four crematoria was blown up by Jewish workers, whose job it was to clear away the bodies of gas chamber victims. The workers were all caught and killed.
The lesson seems clear, if you allow yourself to be transported to a FEMA camp, you’re probably not coming out alive. Therefore, since resistance within the camp is futile, you have three options. One, do not get caught. Two, you can choose to acquiesce and hope your compliance and your search meaning is successful. Three, you can try to escape. To survive by going along to get along, requires a fair amount of luck to survive. From my perspective, I believe history teaches that mounting an organized escape effort may be the best chance for survival that an inmate has put coming out of the death camp experience, alive.
Will You and Your Community
Resist the Tyranny?
Despite the stereotype which betrays all Jews as willing and meekly going to their slaughter, is not totally accurate. There are plenty of examples where the Jews met force with force and refused to be subjugated. For example, on September 3, 1942, seven hundred Jewish families escaped from the Tuchin Ghetto, located in the Ukraine. However, the Nazis hunted them down, and only 15 survived.
By 1943, the ghetto residents, in the famous Warsaw Ghetto, had organized an army of about 1,000 men, mostly unarmed and without military equipment. In January 1943, German soldiers entered the ghetto to round up more Jews for shipment to the death camps. They were met by a volley of bombs, Molotov cocktails, and a few bullets from the sparse number of firearms which had been smuggled into the ghettos. Twenty German soldiers were killed. The action encouraged a few members of the Polish resistance to support the uprising, and a few machine guns, some hand grenades, and about a hundred rifles and revolvers were smuggled in.
The Germans returned with almost 3,000 crack German troops and eventually overcame the resistance and about 300 Germans were killed. Jewish losses were estimated at 15,000. Some Jews survived and some actually did escape, but not many.
Conclusion
According to the lessons of history, there can be no question that being sent to a concentration camp (i.e. FEMA camp) is an almost certain death sentence. We have seen that resistance at the point of arrest is futile. Armed and organized resistance which includes community involvement, produces long odds for survival, but some do survive. Resisting captors inside of the concentration camp, by an means necessary, is nearly fatal in every case. Acquiescing to authority, while one carves out a life under very dire circumstances, provides the best chance for survival. However, under these conditions, one’s survival is highly dependent on being lucky.
The best chance for survival if you are ever transported to a FEMA camp, is to avoid being caught in the first place. The next part in this series explores how one can best evade capture for both themselves and their family members.
A common Rule of Thumb….when ever a bureaucrat asks you a question, a safe “answer” is toask them a question in return. Be polite, but be firm. They often want to extract information out of you without you being the wiser. There is no transparency in the manner of their interaction with you. A good example of this is in the article below….here is what I do. You do what you want.
Example: Did you know you were speeding back there ?
answer: Was I speeding ?
What is your name ?
Is there a problem officer ?
Where are you going ?
Is there a problem officer ?
Can I look in your trunk ?
Do you have a warrant ?
Why can’t I just answer the question and be safe? In law if you answer the question [ANY QUESTION], you have “joined the issue”, meaning that you have unwittingly become a part of the officer’s jurisdiction. To “join” means to become part of an alliance, or to enter into an alliance. You have constitutional protections to guard against such intrusions into your privacy. To be safe, just follow the simple Rule of Thumb. Disclaimer: This is not to be construed as legal advice. Do you own a gun ? Why do you need to know ? Keep it simple. Stop the intrusion into something they have no business asking.
The Patriot Act was passed by both Houses. Don’t help them reduce your freedom.
In the article below, use your best judgment….or you might find yourself where you don’t want to be.
Another way of finding out our “PRIVACY”
Never answer the question….
Do you have a gun in the house ? Why do you need to know ?
GOOD TO KNOW !
When I had my gangrene gallbladder taken out and spent 10 days in the hospital for what should have been an overnight stay the insurance company kicked me out. I had home nurse visits for two weeks and was asked if I had guns in the house. I respond that if I did I would not tell them. So the below has some merit.
FYI, I am passing this along… there are comments from two other people I have also been asked if we keep guns in the house. The nurse just kinda slipped it in along with all the other regular questions. I told her I refused to answer because it was against the law to ask.
Everyone, whether you have guns or not, should give a neutral answer so they have no idea who does and who doesn’t. My doctor asked me if I had guns in my house and also if any were loaded. I, of course, answered yes to both questions. Then he asked why I kept a loaded gun close to my bed. I answered that my son, who is a certified gun instructor and also works for Homeland Security, advised me that an unloaded, locked up gun is no protection against criminal attack.
The Government now requires these questions be asked of people on Medicare, and probably everyone else.
Just passing this along for your information: I had to visit a doctor other than my regular doctor when my doctor was on vacation.. One of the questions on the form I had to fill out was: Do you have any guns in your house?? My answer was None of your damn business!!
So it is out there ! It is either an insurance issue or government intervention. Either way, it is out there and the second the government gets into your medical records (as they want to under Obamacare) it will become a major issue and will ultimately result in lock and load !!
Please pass this on to all the other retired guys and gun owners… Thanks, from a Vietnam Vet and retired Police Officer: I had a doctor’s appointment at the local VA clinic yesterday and found out something very interesting that I would like to pass along. While going through triage before seeing the doctor, I was asked at the end of the exam, three questions: 1. Did I feel stressed ? 2. Did I feel threatened ? 3. Did I feel like doing harm to someone ?
The nurse then informed me that if I had answered yes to any of the questions I would have lost my concealed carry permit as it would have gone into my medical records and the VA would have reported it to Homeland Security.
Looks like they are going after the vets first. Other gun people like retired law enforcement will probably be next. Then when they go after the civilians, what argument will they have ? Be forewarned and be aware. The Obama administration has gone on record as considering veterans and gun owners potential terrorists. Whether you are a gun owner, veteran or not, YOU’VE BEEN WARNED !
If you know veterans and gun owners, please pass this on to them. Be very cautious about what you say and to whom.
Following his scripted dog and pony show with a gaggle of stage prop children, the imperial president on Wednesday signed a number of “executive actions” he claims will reduce “gun violence” (the actions do not cover violence committed with hammers and clubs which outpace violence committed with rifles).
The list includes an effort to turn doctors into stool pigeons for the state and encourages them to ask patients if they have guns at home and then ascertain if they are a threat to society. Mental health “professionals” will be obliged to rat out patients who might be suffering from paranoid delusions. So much for doctor-patient confidentiality.
Expect more on “gun safety” and mental illness as Obamacare come fully online. It will be used to take the firearms of citizens who will be designated mentally ill much the same way veterans who suffer from PTSD are now having their guns confiscated.
It is no mistake the feds are conflating “gun safety” and mental illness. In the not too distant future, the government will classify gun ownership as a “safety” issue that threatens family members and society as a whole. The establishment media is already attempting to portray the so-called “gun culture” as a form of collective mental illness requiring “common sense” (as mandated by the state). It is also actively and aggressively demonizing advocates of the Second Amendment as “nutjobs” who need hospitalization.
Here is the full laundry list of “actions” Obama plans to take without consulting Congress or the American people:
1. Issue a Presidential Memorandum to require federal agencies to make relevant data available to the federal background check system.
2. Address unnecessary legal barriers, particularly relating to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, that may prevent states from making information available to the background check system.
3. Improve incentives for states to share information with the background check system.
4. Direct the Attorney General to review categories of individuals prohibited from having a gun to make sure dangerous people are not slipping through the cracks.
5. Propose rulemaking to give law enforcement the ability to run a full background check on an individual before returning a seized gun.
6. Publish a letter from ATF to federally licensed gun dealers providing guidance on how to run background checks for private sellers.
7. Launch a national safe and responsible gun ownership campaign.
8. Review safety standards for gun locks and gun safes (Consumer Product Safety Commission).
9. Issue a Presidential Memorandum to require federal law enforcement to trace guns recovered in criminal investigations.
10. Release a DOJ report analyzing information on lost and stolen guns and make it widely available to law enforcement.
11. Nominate an ATF director.
12. Provide law enforcement, first responders, and school officials with proper
training for active shooter situations.
13. Maximize enforcement efforts to prevent gun violence and prosecute gun crime.
14. Issue a Presidential Memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control to research the causes and prevention of gun violence.
15. Direct the Attorney General to issue a report on the availability and most effective use of new gun safety technologies and challenge the private sector to develop innovative technologies.
16. Clarify that the Affordable Care Act does not prohibit doctors asking their patients about guns in their homes.
17. Release a letter to health care providers clarifying that no federal law prohibits them from reporting threats of violence to law enforcement authorities.
18. Provide incentives for schools to hire school resource officers.
19. Develop model emergency response plans for schools, houses of worship and institutions of higher education.
20. Release a letter to state health officials clarifying the scope of mental health services that Medicaid plans must cover.
21. Finalize regulations clarifying essential health benefits and parity requirements within ACA exchanges.
22. Commit to finalizing mental health parity regulations.
23. Launch a national dialogue led by Secretaries Sebelius and Duncan on mental health.
You will notice Decrypted Matrix no longer operates a Facebook Page. Within the last few days we have willfully resigned from the service and shut down all pages and profiles. This new information below proves that was an appropriate course of action. -Max Maverick, Editor
Facebook is purging accounts that carry pro-second amendment and pro-liberty information in a censorship purge that has accelerated over the past few hours, with innumerable pages being disappeared merely for posting legitimate political content.
NaturalNews.com’s Mike Adams contacted us to alert us to the fact that “Facebook banned our account for posting this,” with an attached image of a Gandhi quote about how the British disarmed the citizenry during their rule in India.
The following is a list of Facebook accounts operated by individuals in the alternative media that have been shut down by Facebook staff over the past 24 hours. Infowars writer Aaron Dykes and political dissident Brandon J. Raub have also had their accounts deleted. Raub was snatched by police and forcibly imprisoned in a psychiatric ward earlier this year for posting political content on Facebook. Infowars editor Kurt Nimmo also had his account suspended this morning.
Kurt Nimmo (account suspended)
Aaron Dykes (account inactive)
Amber Lyon (account suspended)
Brandon J. Raub (account inactive)
Michael F Rivero (account inactive)
Anthony J Hilder (account inactive)
William Lewis (account inactive)
Richard Gage (account inactive)
William Rodriguez (account inactive)
Infowar Artist (account inactive)
We are Change (account inactive)
Wacboston At Twitter (account inactive)
Michael Murphy Tmp (account inactive)
Robert M Bowman (account inactive)
Peter Dale Scott (account inactive)
Jason Infowars (account inactive)
Mike Skuthan (account inactive)
Packy Savvenas (account inactive)
Sean Wright (account inactive)
Katherine Albrect (account inactive)
It is important to stress that most of these accounts have not simply been temporarily suspended, they have been shut down completely. Some are now being reinstated after complaints. Accounts that have been suspended can still be seen but posting rights have been revoked.
A 24 hour suspension was also placed on the Alex Jones Facebook account due to an image that another user had posted in which Alex Jones was tagged.
One of the messages being received by users having their accounts suspended is displayed below. In most cases, users are not even being informed of why their page was suspended or deleted, with Facebook merely referring them to the company’s guidelines.
Last week, we reported on how Facebook was suspending user accounts that questioned the official narrative behind the Sandy Hook school massacre.
As we have previously highlighted, Facebook occasionally deletes images and posts that it claims violate “Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities,” yet constitute little more than political conjecture or a healthy skepticism of official narratives on current events.
In September 2011, Infowars reporter Darrin McBreen was told by Facebook staff not to voice his political opinion on the social networking website.
Responding to comments McBreen had made about off-grid preppers being treated as criminals, the “Facebook Team” wrote, “Be careful making about making political statements on facebook,” adding, “Facebook is about building relationships not a platform for your political viewpoint. Don’t antagonize your base. Be careful and congnizat (sic) of what you are preaching.”
The “purity” of journalism, and its willingness to act as a “fourth estate” of political influence has fluctuated over the course of American history. In the historic role the press created for itself, as an institution designed to act on the behalf of the people, it is beholden to certain ethical obligations. Viewing journalism as an essential component of a free society requires the existence of reporters who will fairly and truthfully cover events that impact our lives. But today, many would argue that the implied contract between the public and their news media is being infringed upon. In an effort to supply American citizens with compelling, round-the-clock news stories, the pillars of ethical journalism are often brushed aside in favor of expedience. Journalism that proliferates sensationalism and celebrity “news”, while presenting speculation as fact runs rampant.
re be “walled off” from defendants, court systems and the public.
